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Book ‘is s- _. 

Copyright N°.__ 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 












TALKS TO BOYS 




Rendering soul aid. 


(Page 93) 




























I 


Talks to Boys 

Getting Ready to Be a Man 


by 

JOSEPH P. CONROY, S.J. 

Author of “Out to Win,” tic. 



New York, Cincinnati, Chicago 

BENZIGER BROTHERS 


PRINTERS TO THE 
HOLY APOSTOLIC SEE 


PUBLISHERS OF 
BENZIGER’S MAGAZINE 

























imprttnt $oteat. 

A. J. Burrowes, S.J. 

Prxp • Prov■ Missourianice. 

ilifnl <£tetat. 

Arthur J. Scanlan, S.T.D. 

Censor Librorum 


imprimatur. 

►^Patrick J. Hayes, D.D. 

Archbishop of New York. 


New York, August 29, 1923 


Copyright, 1923. by Bknziger Brothers 
Printed in the United States of America 


INTRODUCTORY NOTE 


W HILE the “Talks to Boys” were ap¬ 
pearing in The Queen’s Work, the 
writer frequently received letters from boy 
friends, telling him that they had read his 
“stories” with profit. Their use of the word 
“stories” was especially pleasing criticism, 
since it indicated that they had seized the 
writer’s point of view in these little talks— 
namely, by means of parables taken from the 
daily life and experiences of a boy, to urge him 
on, in a natural way, to the use of his super¬ 
natural advantages. 

The Talks are not, therefore, to be taken as a 
complete guide to the spiritual life. The boys 
to whom they are addressed are already thor¬ 
oughly instructed in their religion by capable 
teachers and professors in Catholic schools and 
colleges. And these Talks are designed simply 
to have the boy realize the importance of doing 
for himself, with God’s help, what he has been 
so well taught by others. To put it figura- 

7 


V 


8 


Introductory Note 

tively, the big engine is on the rails, ready to 
start away, and to keep the wheels from slip¬ 
ping the “stories” will, it is hoped, prove to be 
a little sand on the track. 

J. C. 


Feast of St. Stanislaus , 1915. 


CONTENTS 


Introductory Note 



PAGE 

7 

A Center Shot 



11 

On Bad Umpiring . 



17 

Imitating Towser . 



27 

On Sowing Wild Oats . 



35 

Bluffer & Co. 



41 

The Candy-Store Dreamer . 



49 

On Cold-Storage Piety 



58 

Get a Ladder .... 



65 

The Misfits .... 



79 

On a Priest’s Vocation . 



88 

On Adding Machines . 



95 

Following the Mule . 



103 

On Business Methods . 



111 

On Snake Charmers 



117 

In the Trenches . 



125 

Seeing the Star . 



136 

With the Others . 



145 

A Touch of the Whip . 



154 

Sinking the Wooden Ones . 



161 

On Planting Regrets . 



169 

On Having Our Own Way . 



177 

Mother of Good Counsel . 



186 


9 
























' 






























































f 

• ' 






TALKS TO BOYS 


A CENTER SHOT 

1 WILL do better this year.” 

How many of us have made this resolu¬ 
tion? Every single one of us. A fine resolu¬ 
tion it is; one we ought to make. And the boy 
who doesn’t make it can take it for granted 
that there is something very wrong with that 
motor inside of him, his will. Yet after we do 
make the resolution, when the time comes to 
cast up accounts, and we look back over the 
past, we find too often that we didn’t do what 
we promised ourselves. The field is not 
plowed. The crop is absent. Our resolution 
did not grow at all. 

It looked like a simple resolution, at that— 
easy to understand, easy to follow. It was a 
matter of time. We had that—a year’s time. 
A matter of means. We had them—our pro¬ 
fessors, our books, our brains; leisure, health 
and plenty of food. What was lacking? We 
knew what “doing better” meant, and we didn’t 
do it. Why not? We promised ourselves to 
be out of the rut at the year’s close—back 



12 


A Center Shot 


on the track again, running easily out toward 
the front. And at the end we find ourselves 
stumbling awkwardly along the same old 
groove. 

What is the answer? The answer is that 
the real difficulty was just where we didn’t 
expect it, did not look for it. We knew three 
things in that resolution—the time, the means, 
the “doing better”—but we did not know the 
fourth, the one great essential thing, the ap¬ 
parently insignificant, the evanescent “I.” 
That is what counts in any resolution, and we 
forgot it! 

“I am going to do better.” What does this 
mean? It means that, in some matters at least, 
I am in the wrong place—running with the 
wrong crowd, holding on to the wrong thoughts, 
doing wrong actions—and I intend to take 
myself out of it and put myself somewhere 
else, literally carry myself somewhere else. 
And I fail simply because I don’t know what 
that “I” is that has to be carried. 

In a matter of any kind of transportation 
the very first question is, “What are you 
going to carry?” Suppose Mr. Bunhead walks 
into a railroad office and says: 





A Center Shot 


13 


“I want to use your line for transportation.” 
“Yes, sir; what is it you wish us to haul for 
you?” 

“Really,” replies Bunhead, “I don’t know.” 
“Don’t know? Well, you’ve got to tell what 
the haul is or we can’t work at all. What is 
it? Dynamite, or watermelons, or mules?” 

“Why, I can’t just say,” says Bunhead. 
“It is all too complicated for me.” 

“Good-by.” 

The office man goes back quietly to his books. 
Bunhead makes his exit. And the haul stays 
exactly where it was. 

Now, when we bring things right down to 
the last point, the real reason why we don’t 
do better with our resolution, why we don’t haul 
ourselves from the wrong place to the right 
place, is because we don’t know what the haul 

is. We don’t know ourselves. We throw out 
our chest, lift up our head, perch upon an 
appropriate elevation, and emit a long rever¬ 
berating crow that wakes up the neighborhood. 
That’s our resolution, and we are proud of 

it. It carried a tremendous distance—through 
the air. But immediately after, we hop down 
from our perch and begin pecking away at 



14 


A Center Shot 

the same old straw and cinders. We go back 
to the same old lazy ways, the same old crowd, 
the same old thoughts and actions. 

Yet we have a vague idea that we are not 
doing quite as we promised ourselves and the 
w T orld at large. But we know exactly why 
that is. Suppose it is our studies we were 
going to do better in. Why are we not doing 
better? “Oh, it’s too hot to study”; or, “I 
haven’t got my books yet”; or, “Say, I’d do 
all right only for that Greek”; or, “Gee, but 
the studies in our class are dry!” 

Suppose, again, it is a bad crowd we are 
going with. We are going to quit it. We 
don’t. Why not? “Oh, Bill called for me, 
and I couldn’t refuse”; or, “They need me on 
their team”; or, “We’re only going to the pic¬ 
ture show.” 

See where we go to lay the blame for our 
failure to go straight? On something or some¬ 
body outside of ourselves, every time. And the 
real trouble is where we never think of looking 
for it —inside of us. Something is wrong at 
the very center, where the “I” lives, and we 
never give it a thought. 

If Jack Doolittle will only look there, he 
will soon find that he has no courage, no driv- 


A Center Shot 


15 


ing power, no attack, no fighting pluck in him. 
His resolution was nothing but a loud crow, 
and in his flabby defeat he is as dead as a log, 
except for the groans he lets out, groans about 
somebody else or something else, but never 
about the thing for which they should be given 
—himself. 

And it will be the same in the matter of bad 
habits. He is always going to be better, but 
never actually is better. Why? He has not 
one good fight left in him. The old thoughts, 
desires, actions, push him over as they always 
did. Any time they wish to tramp on him 
they can tramp; can have him whenever they 
whistle for him; go as far as they like with 
him. And this is the end of the young vocal 
hero who just now shot the red-hot challenge, 
“I will do better this year.” He has not lasted 
an hour. 

If, my dear boys, you want to get out of 
this class Z, if you want to be what you pro¬ 
claim you are going to be, start in right away 
and find out what kind of boy you are on the 
inside. That’s where the trouble is. Don’t 
blame anybody else. You are the one to get 
after. Do a little detective work on yourself, 
and you will be surprised at the catch you will 


16 


A Center Shot 


make. Are you lazy? An evader of present 
work, a shifter of present burdens? A boy 
who slinks away from a difficulty, mumbling 
excuses as he shuffles aside, furtively rolling a 
mental eye for the nearest hole to crawl 
through? Don’t talk about “this year.” Start 
now, this minute, and the year will take care 
of itself. 

Are you in with the wrong crowd of boys, 
or thoughts, or actions? Find this out, and 
start now to throw them out of every corner 
of your life, and out of the first window you 
come to. Don’t be afraid of yourself, but 
begin the hauling process on yourself this min¬ 
ute. Don’t proclaim yourself a finished hero 
and then quit at the very beginning of the 
struggle. But open the fight, not with a shout, 
but with a shot—a center shot right at your¬ 
self, and keep up that kind of fighting all the 
way through. After it is over, you will not 
have breath enough to make the welkin ring 
with applause for yourself. But you will not 
need it. Your friends, your parents, your in¬ 
nermost heart, and, best of all, God will ap¬ 
prove your work as the work of a faithful 
servant. 


ON BAD UMPIRING 


A heart that goeth two ways shall not have 
success .— Ecclesiasticus. 

T HE most irritating thing in any game, 
and the thing most destructive of real 
interest, is a bad umpire. In football or in 
baseball we all know how a bad umpire un¬ 
nerves and discourages the players, disgusts 
the spectators, and turns the game from a 
battle into a burlesque. The best laid plans 
of mice and men are often ruined by the 
umpire. 

Now, if we study this umpire question we 
shall discover that there are three kinds of bad 
umpires. There is the stupid umpire. He 
means well, but he doesn’t know the game, or 
he can’t follow the plays quickly enough; or, 
after he does see the play, he is timid about 
his decision. Then, when he sees he has bungled 
matters, he tries to “even up” on the next 
decision, until he has everything in one frenzied 
mess, himself included; and the final scene 


18 On Bad Umpiring 

shows that as an umpire he is a very good 
sprinter. 

Next we have the umpire who deliberately 
cheats, openly and horribly. He calls a fair 
ball a foul; he shows open prejudices against 
individuals or against a whole team—a Nero 
on the ball-field. 

And finally, the umpire with a leaning. He 
secretly favors one side; at first sight ap¬ 
parently fair, but on closer inspection found 
to be “giving the edge” to his favorites. Every 
close decision goes to his friends, simply be¬ 
cause he wishes them to win. And he manages 
to multiply and manufacture close decisions 
until his friends finally do win. 

This is the umpire who makes us wild. The 
reason is that he adds sneaking, hypocrisy, to 
cheating, and we are to a great degree defense¬ 
less. We may laugh at the stupid umpire and 
remove him; shake our fist in the cheating um¬ 
pire’s face and eliminate him. But with the 
last fellow we are helpless. We know him to 
be unfair, but he manipulates his lights and 
shadows—especially the shadows—so skill¬ 
fully that we are bewildered, baffled, and, even 




I am running with the wrong crowd. 


(Page 12) 


























21 


On Bad Umpiring 

while we are looking on, betrayed. And the 
deed is done with such an air of baby inno¬ 
cence that, in spite of the flat evidence, we won¬ 
der if after all we are only dreaming a dream. 

We all realize the situation, because we have 
been in it—not, let us hope, as umpires, but at 
least as the umpired. We know how it feels, 
and we say to ourselves, “Well, anyway, I 
would never be as rotten an umpire as that 
fellow. ,, 

And yet, my dear boys, every day, and 
right through each day, and in a game, or 
rather a battle, for life and death much more 
important than any game of football or base¬ 
ball, we are called upon to be umpires. We 
actually act as umpires, and we cannot avoid 
doing so. “What is the game?” you ask. It 
is the game, the battle, of saving our soul. And 
the spectators are God and the angels and 
saints. 

Where is this battle fought, and when, and 
how? It is fought in our own souls, every day, 
every hour. A continual contest between good 
and evil goes on within us between the powers 
of light and the powers of darkness; between 


22 


On Bad Umpiring 

grace on one side and sin on the other. And 
we are the umpires. 

Sin is the aggressor upon grace in our souls, 
the intruder breaking into our house, strug¬ 
gling to possess the field of our soul. Now, 
in this battle between grace and sin in our soul 
grace should win always, sin always be de¬ 
feated. Yet it happens, perhaps often, that 
sin is not beaten, but comes out victorious. 
And why so? Because— 

Our umpiring is bad. 

Remember, we are the umpires in this all- 
important series of battles. We know that 
sin is an intruder, a destroyer, attacking the 
soul to wreck it. We know that against grace 
it ought never win a decision, and that when 
sin wins, every rule of the game of life is 
broken. If grace were given the proper chance, 
the chance God wants it to have, it would win 
against sin every time. Nevertheless grace 
is defeated. Why? Entirely through our de¬ 
cision. We umpire between sin and grace, 
and we let sin in—to win! 

And in this contest we do not act as stupid 
umpires either, but with our eyes wide open. 
We know all along what we are doing. We 



28 


On Bad Umpiring 

know we are cheating God. And it isn’t open 
cheating in big things. We shall arrive at that 
stage later. 

But we choose little things to start our cheat¬ 
ing with. We give the edge to sin. We shade 
the decisions in sin’s favor. We “lean” toward 
sin, and we do it so cleverly that we render the 
spectators helpless. God and the angels and 
the saints can do nothing for us, because we 
put on an innocent face and assure them that 
we are really deciding as we see things. And 
after a sufficient number of shady decisions, 
and after we have thrown the game over to 
sin and grace is lost to us, then we actually try 
to cheat ourselves into believing that we 
couldn’t help it. 

Apply all this to our everyday life and we 
shall see how true it is that we finally defeat 
God’s grace by giving the edge, the little de¬ 
cisions, to the devil. For example, our prayers, 
morning and evening. We used to say them 
and consider it a matter of importance. But 
now they are gone almost altogether. By what 
process? By hurry and deliberate distraction 
and sly cutting down and mumbling; down to 
a few idiotic hand movements accompanied by 


24 


On Bad Umpiring 

an inarticulate groan, and we have our prayers 
whittled away to a point, and vanishing off 
the point. Giving the edge to sin! 

Where are our old-time weekly communions ? 
Look over the list of excuses we have given 
ourselves for reducing these to monthly and 
maybe bi-monthly communions. “I forgot.” 
“I was too tired.” “Too big a crowd in the 
church.” “I had to work.” “I’ll go next 
week.” And “next week” hasn’t arrived yet. 

Then our companions: Why have they be¬ 
come steadily of a deteriorating grade? “Oh, 
I let them talk. They can’t hurt me. I’d like 
to see them get me off the track!” That is pre¬ 
cisely why they do get us off the track: because 
we “like to see them do it.” But in the begin¬ 
ning we gave them the edge. And in the end, 
after our once powerful engine has jumped the 
track and rolled into the ditch, the devil gives 
us a horse-laugh. 

And when the year’s end comes, why the 
“flunks”? Trace them back and we shall see 
they all began in little lazinesses, loppings-off 
of home study, little evenings out, little post¬ 
ponements, little misunderstandings the next 
day at class, little “explanations” at home and 


25 


On Bad Umpiring 

to the professor, until finally we could explain 
anything and everything. And were explain¬ 
ing them, too. 

Again, why this ever-increasing independ¬ 
ence of, even arrogance toward, our parents? 
Because we let in the little idea some time back 
that as we grow large they grow small, and as 
we go up they have to go down. 

And why the constant increase in strength 
of our temptations? Because we gave the edge 
to the notion that we could read whatever we 
pleased, look at whatever we pleased, go 
wherever we pleased. “It isn’t a mortal sin, 
is it?” we asked, with a triumphant contempt 
of all the insistent warnings of conscience. 
And conscience finally did what we, in our 
underhand way, were ordering it to do all the 
time—it shut up. A dead conscience! 

Always giving the edge, we finally gave the 
game to sin. Our umpiring is false, unfair, 
and, worst of all, hypocritical, disgusting God 
and making Him reject us. 

If we are hovering anywhere near this kind 
of umpiring, my dear boys, if we find ourselves 
giving the little decisions to the devil, and at the 
same time are making constant excuses to our- 


26 On Bad Umpiring 

selves that we are perfectly just, let us make 
up our minds to stop it. Be square on this 
point, fearless, candid. Decide the case as we 
see it, but be sure to see it. There is where we 
lose—we refuse to see the play. After all, 
this affected blindness, this double-dealing of 
ours, this sly cheating of God—whom does it 
hurt in the long run? Only ourselves. We can 
never win at this game. For “a heart that 
goeth two ways shall not have success.” 



IMITATING TOWSER 


OU recollect the fable of the dog and the 



A piece of meat. Towser, carrying a fine, 
fresh piece of meat in his mouth, is crossing 
a plank over a stream, and he looks down. 
There in the dimpling water he sees another 
piece of meat, which looks much fresher, 
redder, juicier, than the old worn-out thing he 
is carrying. And he makes a quick bite at 
piece number two. Result—a pensive Towser. 

“Well,” we say, “that’s just like a dog— 
naturally foolish. Being a dog, he has no sense 
and he never will have any.” 

Then, why the fable? If Towser never will 
have sense, what’s the use of talking ajbout his 
blunder? 

Because the man who wrote that fable did 
not really mean it for Towser at all. He was 
shrewdly pointing out a class of people, and 
some boys among them, who give remarkably 
clever imitations of Towser’s little act for a 
whole lifetime and never seem to think there 
is anything in the least wrong with it. 


27 


28 Imitating Towser 

What kind of a boy is it, you ask, who 
imitates Towser? 

It is the boy who always wants something 
he hasn’t got. He is always living in the 
future; and, when that comes, he is still dis¬ 
satisfied, keeps looking ahead, thinking ahead, 
living ahead of himself all the time. At first 
he lives ahead of himself only an hour or two. 
With practice he stretches it to twenty-four 
hours, then to weeks, months, years, until his 
mind is reduced to a mere thread, which he uses 
to cast for impossible fish that he thinks he 
sees. 

And among boys there are some familiar 
types of this living ahead of oneself. First we 
may mention The Anxious Child. Take this 
boy on a school day, for example, and at nine 
o’clock he is thinking of recess, or worrying 
whether he is going to be asked next to recite 
or whether he will be asked at all. Recess 
comes, he thinks of the noon hour. And during 
the afternoon recitations he is always on his 
mark, ready for a dash for the exits. He looks 
at his watch feverishly every two minutes. 
How time drags! If he could only get behind 
time, as it were, and push it ahead to the com- 


Imitating Towser 29 

ing ball game, or tennis tournament, or skating 
party! Meantime his mind is adrift from the 
real work going on right before him. He has 
only a hazy notion of a voice in a fog. Every¬ 
thing two hours ahead is perfectly clear in his 
mind, but everything here and now is one bore- 
some blur. 

And after the horrible two hours are killed, 
when the game comes what do we find? The 
same restlessness in the boy. He wants a new 
game; or else the game isn’t going the way it 
should. This way isn’t right. Something just 
ahead is the right thing. And what is the out¬ 
come of it all? A peevish, fretful, nervous, un¬ 
happy boy—The Anxious Child. 

The Athlete Child is a higher development 
along the same lines. For The Athlete Child 
there is generally only one day in the week, 
the day of the football game. All his time is 
condensed into that great day. All roads lead 
to that Rome of his thoughts, and they never 
lead away from it. At school all day, at home 
making motions over his books, he is thinking 
only of the day of the next game—what kind 
of weather it will be; how heavy the other 
fellows will average; whether the field will be 



30 Imitating Towser 

dry; how Billy Hotstuff’s ankle will hold out; 
how He, Himself, will star and “show up” 
his opponent. 

And as he stares at his books, supposedly 
getting up his work for next day, he doesn’t 
see a line of the text, because the football line 
gets in between him and the book—and that is 
the line he studies. He sees himself going 
around the end for a long run, “straightarm- 
ing” the enemy one by one, dashing through 
the goal to the accompaniment of nine fren¬ 
zied ’rahs for Tommie Gray. All this a 
week hence! Suddenly he hears a voice, his 
father’s: 

“Time to go to bed, Tom. Have you got 
your lessons?” t 

“Sure, Pop.” There is only one lesson for 
Tommie. And, after dreaming all day, he 
actually has the nerve to go to bed and sleep 
all night. 

But the highest achievement in the type is 
reached when the boy has so developed that he 
lives in but two periods in the year—the Christ¬ 
mas holidays and the summer vacations. This 
is the classic product in the gentle art of living 
ahead of oneself. In the fall months the ques- 



Imitating Towser 31 

tion ever is, “How long till Christmas ?” After 
that period, “When will vacation begin ?” For 
such a boy single days of play pass by as straws 
on a stream. His big golden galleons, his 
stately ships of the line, are those thoroughbred 
ocean hounds, the Vacation Times. When 
does school close ? How long will the vacation 
last ? These are the two important life-matters 
for him. These fixed, he settles into a pro¬ 
found drowse and sees things in the rosy future 
that make De Quincey’s opium dreams seem 
pale and bloodless. 

“Oh, the old swimmin’ hole! Ain’t the water 
great!” Any one can tell he isn’t a grammar 
specialist. Six months ahead of time he has 
had all-dav swims in the “swimmin’ hole”; has 
dived hundreds of times off every high spot 
around it; lolled in the cool water by the hour. 
“And those baseball games, tennis games, long 
auto drives! Yum, yum!” 

He hears mysterious voices, though not like 
the voices that called Joan of Arc. Her voices 
called her to work. These invariably and im¬ 
peratively summon him to play. 

“Get your fishing tackle and go up Nevin’s 
brook for trout.” Whole days he goes up 


32 Imitating Towser 

Nevin’s brook, and incidentally “goes up” in 
his studies. 

“Bring out your canoe, and we’ll take a river 
trip.” Happy weeks, drifting with the current 
down the river! He lies back and hears the 
ripples gurgling around the keel; feels the 
velvet air caressing his upturned face, stirring 
his raven hair; trails his languid hand in the 
sliding water. Green trees on either bank, 
and the blue sky up above, and the rich sun! 
What a fine tan he is putting on! Gee, but he’s 
getting strong! And he feels even like writing 
poetry. 

The classroom disappears. Dreamy Dan’s 
desk turns into a fishing dock, his pen into a 
fishing pole, his open books into white sails 
dotting the waters, the aisle into a silver 
stream, the students into trees, the walls and 
blackboards into low blue hills in the distance. 
Oh, the scenery! 

And when exams come along, old Dreamy 
Dan gives the class an exhibition of some real 
gurgling. Chilly days for Dan, while he tears 
at the same old raven locks for an idea, and his 
hand feels paralyzed as his downturned face 
meets the long, long stretches of foolscap 


Imitating Towser 33 

(“foolscap” is right), and he wonders how in 
the world he’ll ever cover all that desert tract 
with some writing! And a beautiful tan on his 
head, which feels like leather! And afterward, 
with dad at home—oh, the scenery! 

What must be the practical outcome of this 
kind of existence? All of us can answer that 
there is none. A boy of this character, with 
these ideals, will never do real work. Work 
is done tww, not an hour, a week from now. 
It is accomplished by close attention to detail, 
and the dreamer in futures can never be the 
doer in the present. And who will trust such 
a boy? We all judge of the future ability of 
a man by his present power. And our boy 
who lives in the future will be found to be a 
poor, inaccurate, vague, effortless producer of 
today’s work. 

Such a boy, too, is easily tempted to sin. 
He will yield to temptation now, because he 
is going to be better next week. “Yes,” he will 
admit, “I am a little careless right now, but 
just you watch me the next month and you’ll 
see the improvement.” Such resolves as these 
fill the devil with joy. He will trade a hundred 
“next month” resolutions for one yielding to 



34 Imitating Towser 

temptation “now.” Because he knows that if 
he wins now, he will win more easily next week. 

The best way, the only way to build a future, 
either for this world or the next, is to build 
a present. There is no future. When it comes 
it isn’t the future, and before it comes it doesn’t 
exist at all. Be sensible about this idea and 
learn it young. Do each piece of work care¬ 
fully, cautiously, cleanly, with full detail. Push 
aside the dreams, the going-to-be, the wait-and- 
see and the watch-me-later. Because the going- 
to-be’s of youth are inevitably the might-have- 
been’s of manhood. 


ON SOWING WILD OATS 


H ERE is a phrase that has done an in¬ 
calculable amount of harm—“sowing 
wild oats.” It is applied to youth, generally 
with a limited application to growing boys and 
young men. What does it mean? It is sup¬ 
posed to be a polite way of expressing the idea 
of a dissipated life, of years uncontrolled by 
any of the Ten Commandments; and, to the 
“initiated,” it always carries with it the under¬ 
lying notion of a bad life. 

In its practical application and interpreta¬ 
tion, therefore, it is a phrase that is used to 
condone offenses against God, to minimize sin, 
to make light of impurity, to pretend that un¬ 
cleanness is a necessary thing in every young 
life—a thing to be expected, tolerated, over¬ 
looked, excused. Often enough we hear out 
of the mouth of persons who pose as con¬ 
noisseurs of life such talk as this: “Oh, So- 
and-So is wild, dissipated, a rake. But he is 
only sowing his wild oats. He’ll turn out well, 
settle dowm and be a good man.” 

The effect of this teaching upon the grow¬ 
ing boy is deadly. He hears it lightly said that 

35 



36 On Sowing Wild Oats 

what he thought was hideous and disgraceful 
is not so bad after all. He is practically told 
that impurity is the usual preliminary to the 
real work of life, a stage of growth through 
which a boy normally goes, a prerequisite to 
right living, a discordant yet necessary over¬ 
ture to the harmony of manhood’s years, the 
common foundation on which everybody builds. 
And the listening boy is weak; perhaps already 
fallen, but struggling to get up from the mire. 
He hears this phrase, an encouragement to him 
to go ahead with his sin. The devil puts the 
catchword into his hands as an excuse for his 
habits: “Goon. Sow your wild oats. You’ll 
be all right in the end. You’ll settle down 
later.” And the youth goes on. 

Now, is this right? “No,” you will tell me, 
“it isn’t right.” It is directly against the law of 
God, binding in youth no less than in age. 
And it is certain to be cursed in the end. From 
our earliest to our latest years God is the one 
who tells us what to do, and not these experi¬ 
menters with virtue. 

But even apart from our faith, is there a 
single grain of reason in this advice to sow wild 
oats? Is there a shred of business sense, a 
spark of ordinary prudence in such a method 
of going about the great affair of our soul’s 


37 


On Sowing Wild Oats 

salvation? Saving our soul is a business propo¬ 
sition. Is there anything like a business propo¬ 
sition in a boy’s sowing wild oats? 

What does the wild-oats idea mean? It 
means that about the early part of your life 
you needn’t care. “Go ahead at any pace you 
choose. Follow passion, be anything you like 
in thought, in word, in action. Be impure, 
obey your animal instincts. All will be well 
later on. You can easily stop whenever you 
have a mind to.” 

I say there is not a particle of business sense 
in this idea. To throw away the early begin¬ 
nings of your life, your youth, your young 
strength—and the rest will be all right—is this 
business ? 

Put the idea into any business you happen 
to think of, and see how it works out. For 
example, as we are talking of wild oats, the 
business of farming. Do you ever notice the 
successful farmer beginning his cultivation by 
letting weeds grow’ all over his farm? The 
farmer nowadays is looked on as a fool for 
neglecting any corner of his land. He watches 
every inch of it all the time. You will find none 
of his land set aside for a wild-oats crop. 

In architecture and building: When the 
plans are made for a skyscraper or a bridge, 


38 


On Sowing Wild Oats 

is it not the foundations that are the great 
source of worry? And when the building 
begins, do you not see that it is rock they begin 
on, and not swamp? And if they cannot find 
the rock they put it there, or its equivalent. 
Suppose you saw the contractor at work on 
your house, starting it with a foundation of 
liay, old weeds, broken pop bottles, and decayed 
rags. I think I hear you saying—“Not for 
my house!” 

In cattle raising follow this rule: Don’t 
bother about the young colts or calves. Let 
them run loose, tear themselves up on the 
barbed-wire fences, run wild across bowlders 
and into deep streams. And any kind of stag¬ 
nant water will do them for drink. They’ll 
grow up all right. 

In business—say a retail grocery: Don’t 
mind the business at the start. Let customers 
wander wherever they care to, take whatever 
they want. These are only losses at the open¬ 
ing. Don’t watch anything. Let the store 
windows get as greasy as they please, the vege¬ 
table display in front stay there till it rots. 
The smell will attract customers. Yes, flies 
and scavengers. But the business will be fine 
“later on.” 



39 


On Sowing Wild Oats 

In medicine: Always begin by paying not 
the least attention to the child. Microbes in 
his lungs? “Why, yes. We put them there; 
had the child infected with them. Don’t worry. 
He will be all right. He’ll breathe beautifully 
when he gets older.” 

But the thing develops into a farce. We 
could go on forever, and show that the one 
elementary thing that simply must be done 
in any business that seeks success is to start 
right, to make a good beginning. 

In any business but the business of the 
soul! Here all rules go by the board. In the 
matter of cabbages or hogs or chimneys or 
freight cars or shoes the start is everything; 
but in the great matter of building your soul 
up to heaven make as poor a start as you pos¬ 
sibly can! Here the beginning isn’t half the 
work. It isn’t any of the work. The worse 
the beginning, the surer the success “later on.” 
In the big business of saving your soul break 
every rule that holds in all other business and 
you are sure to win. Open your life-work by 
doing what the devil, the world, and the flesh 
tell you, and you will have the very best prac¬ 
tice at doing what God tells you “later on.” 
Christ built His Church upon a rock. The 


40 


On Sowing Wild Oats 

wild-oats theory tells you that if you would 
build a lofty soul found it upon a garbage heap. 

The boy who is fooled into beginning his life 
as a follower of the wild-oats idea will regret 
is as long as he can regret anything. 

He has begun wrong, and a shaky founda¬ 
tion always threatens the building that is upon 
it. True, he may hold the building up, but it 
will be with ugly props or binding braces. At 
his best he will lack always the purest touch of 
beauty in his soul, always miss the serenity of 
spirit that dwells with the pure of heart. 

And what of the vast army of young souls 
who never built at all? What of the unnum¬ 
bered thousands who have given up the 
struggle and sunk into the depths of a life of 
sin? Ask any one of these why he is down. 
He will tell you that the longer he is in the 
clutch of habit the less able is he to stop. After 
a while he will stop, but it will not be when he 
has “a mind to.” It will be when he hasn’t 
any mind at all. After a while he will “settle 
down,” but under a mound of earth. And 
he’ll keep settling there a long while—his body 
that should have been the temple of the Holy 
Ghost. And his soul? 



BLUFFER & CO. 


And Tobias said to his son: “Hear, my son, 
the words of my mouth, and lay them as a 
foundation in thy heart: 

“When God shall take my soul, thou shalt 
bury my body, and thou shalt honor thy mother 
all the days of her life — Tobias 4. 

T HINKING himself near to death, Tobias 
called to him his son, the young Tobias, 
and gave him many counsels to be kept “as a 
foundation in his heart.” And the very first 
stone of that foundation was, after honoring 
his father’s body with a fitting burial, that he 
should honor his mother all the days of her 
life. 

It was the first thing the old man had 
learned as a boy. And at the end of a long 
life full of experience it led everything he had 
to say. His practice had confirmed the theory. 
He had found out that this was the way to live 
—to honor father and mother all the days 
of their life. 

Have we learned this lesson? 

41 


42 Bluffer Co. 

“Surely,” we answer. “We learned it the 
first thing.” 

Yes, the theory of it. But have we learned 
it, are we learning it, in practice ? 

Question: “You say you love your par¬ 
ents?” 

Everyboy (very much surprised) : “Why, 
yes, of course. (Aside) Silly question!” 

Question: “But how do you prove that?” 

Everyboy: “Prove it? You insult me! If 
my father or mother were to die you would see 
how I would cry. Believe me, I’d make a 
terrible noise.” 

And if we went over the whole city with 
pencil and paper and took down all the 
answers, we should get all ayes, without a 
doubt. The sentiment is unanimous—in 
theory. 

But in practice? For this, I am afraid, 
we shall have to do a bit of sleuthing and, un¬ 
observed, make a house-to-house canvass. Thus 
we shall be enabled to study Everyboy in his 
native haunts and with the spotlight turned 
off: to catch him napping, in short. After a 
week or so of experiment and research we ob¬ 
tain the following rather remarkable results: 


43 


Bluffer Co. 

Exhibit A. The case of a sweet-voiced, 
mild-mannered, almost sad-eyed child, who 
spoke in low musical tones, unobtrusively but 
alertly attentive to older folk not his relatives, 
and who doffed his hat to the younger ladies 
with an easy grace that was truly—to borrow 
a bromide—Chesterfieldian. All this while 
strictly on exhibition. 

Later, at home: Striking reversal of form. 
The youth enters at the dinner hour. “What! 
Dinner not ready!”—“Is that all we’re going 
to have for dinner? I’ll starve on this stuff!”— 
“Say, somebody stole my tie. I’ll punch your 
head, Jack.” (Jack is a younger brother.) — 

“Here, take this kid out of here” (referring 

* 

to a sister, aged three) “or I’ll slap her out.”— 
“I’m going out to-night to Baker’s party. Yes, 
I am! I don’t care what you or any one else 
says. If I can’t be treated like a man around 
here I’ll go where I will be. I’ll get out of 
this prison and go boarding. I don’t have to 
stay in this old place.” He roars, growls, kicks 
things around, slams doors, dares and defies. 
Every one in the house hushes up. No use in 
trying to talk—the thunder is too loud. 

In the animal shows, you have seen the lion 




44 


Bluffer § Co. 

in his cage and the attendants skip in and out 
of that cage with catlike speed, trying to get 
away from the “noble beast.” Yes, he looks 
all right, but when he forgets he is on exhibi¬ 
tion the animal bites. So here. The parents 
are silent lest their son inflict even more deadly 
wounds than he has already inflicted upon their 
heart. 

Exhibit A is most educational. We have 
named it The Bluffer. 

Exhibit B. The Teaser. A trifle more deli¬ 
cate in texture, but quite an interesting dis¬ 
play. The Teaser, in the open, is an artless, 
tender, manly, cheerful-spirited young fellow; 
takes whatever comes along; never asks for 
anything; most easily satisfied,. “Any old 
thing is good enough for me” is his motto. In 
captivity—in other words, at home—the work- 
side of the beautiful tapestry jumps into 
sudden view. 

“Ma, can’t I get a new suit of clothes? Can’t 
I? Hey? All the other boys have new suits. 
Can’t I get one? Hey, ma? Say, ma” (it 
reads like poetry), “can’t I get a suit like Tom 
Gary’s?” 

Told to go to the store: “Oh, why can’t 


45 


Bluffer <§ Co. 

Jack go? I’m tired. Gee, my foot hurts 
something terrible!” (Business of a hideous 
limp.) “Aw, let Jack go!” 

“Pa, will you give me a quarter? I want 
to go to the nickel show.—Yes, I do too need 
a quarter, because I want to get an ice-cream 
soda after it. Say, pa, will you give me a 
quarter? Huh?” 

And thus The Teaser keeps up his whine, 
his begging, his reiterations, often following 
a long period of whining with the snuffles and 
the pouts and that tears-in-the-voice effect 
which would be worth a fortune in vaudeville. 
He wins at home nearly every time, because, 
like a mosquito, he buzzes, and hums, and sinks 
in his petty little stings till he gets what he 
wants. It’s an awfully pleasant home where 
The Teaser works. 

Looking too long at The Teaser exhibit 
makes one feel weak. So let us move on, 
my friends, to what is perhaps the most artistic 
of all the booths. We now stand before 

Exhibit C. The Smooth Boy. The study of 
this exhibit draws us almost into the intellec¬ 
tual field. There is finer shading in this pic¬ 
ture, and the perspective is managed much 


46 Bluffer <§ Co. 

more cleverly. While at large The Smooth 
Boy poses as a kind of pleasant mystery. He 
sits back and smiles, with a smile which in¬ 
sinuates, “Go on with the game; but no matter 
how fast you go you will always find me just 
a little in the lead. I’ve been through it all 
long ago.” He inclines to be silent, with a 
faint hint of patronizing perfuming the air 
about him. He takes a back seat, with the 
implication that he wishes to give the others 
a chance to get near the things he has all but 
tired of. He never sits so far back, though, 
but that he is within easy reach of any good 
things that are handed out. He inclines to 
silence, but of that golden kind which hides a 
wealth of experience. He is also a good 
listener, and doesn’t seem at all bored by the 
most pathetic platitudes. 

All this, quietly persevered in, brings 
results. His very mystery attracts; his gentle 
silence and patient self-effacement magnetize. 
His admirers think him a wizard. 

In the home circle, too, his wizardry persists. 
He lives just at the edge of the family circle, 
in the penumbra, so to speak, where a single 
move can carry him into deep shadow. When 


47 


Bluffer <§ Co. 

any commands are to be given he sees them 
coming, and instantly becomes invisible. When 
he scents work ahead he gumshoes out of the 
way, behind the heavy interference of the rest 
of the family. Father and mother have to 
pass every one else in the house to get to him. 

He doesn’t ask if he can go anywhere or do 
anything he has his mind set on. He simply 
waits till no one is looking, and goes ahead 
and does it. If it happens that he is told not 
to do a certain thing, he answers deferentially 
“Surely not”—and then forgets that anything 
has been said, and does it if he pleases. He 
really pities his parents. They are so old- 
fashioned, behind the times, such fogies! There 
isn’t the least use in wasting time trying to 
get them to understand, to bring them up to 
date. So he considers them hopeless and bears 
with them. On their part, they feel they have 
only an imitation for a son, a vague figure that 
drifts into their vision and drifts out again, 
eluding every grasp they make at it. The boy 
is so smooth, so eel-like, that he slips away 
from every hand. 

Personally, I prefer The Bluffer or The 
Teaser to The Smooth Boy. They at least 



48 


Bluffer ^ Co. 

give you a chance to catch on somewhere. But 
The Smooth Boy is so slippery that he nearly 
always fails to catch onto himself. And so, as 
a rule, he hurts himself most in the end. He 
begins by keeping all the others guessing; he 
finishes by having himself guessing. 

The above is only my personal preference, 
though. Each one of you, my dear boys, is at 
perfect liberty to choose either of the others as 
the one he would like to boot first. 


THE CANDY-STORE DREAMER 


O NE blowy day, with the wind at half a 
hurricane, I w^as tacking up Grand Ave¬ 
nue. Buffeted about, and becoming tired with 
the effort, I grew conscious of a yearning for 
shelter, when by a particularly fortunate zig¬ 
zag I suddenly found the wind shut off. I had 
instinctively steered into the lee of a huge, 
sturdy sign before a candy store, and with a 
second look I saw that I was not alone. Two 
little fellows had taken the cozy corner of the 
sign, and ensconced in a blissful seclusion, had 
turned their backs upon the street, forgotten 
the hurly-burly and the screaming storm, and, 
with their little faces against the window, were 
looking into a paradise. 

A golden pool of molasses candy, sur¬ 
rounded by soft, crumbly hills of chocolates; 
wide meadows of delicious caramels, divided 
by well-laid roads of shining peanut candy; 
a river of sugar-cream winding about, over 
which, like trees, rose tall, variegated sticks of 
sweetness; in the distance, white heaps of pow¬ 
dery marshmallows, like a snow-capped moun- 

49 


V 



50 The Candy-Store Dr earner 

tain range encircling a fertile valley—such was 
the beautiful vision that pierced and enchanted 
the souls of young Tom and Jack and made 
them forget the world. 

“Hello!” I shouted, not yet used to the quiet 
after the whirl without. “Nice in here, isn’t 
it?” 

“Great!” they murmured, faces still glued 
to the glass, fingers in mouths to relieve the 
inner pain that gnawed their vitals. 

“Say,” I asked, “if you boys could get on 
the other side of that pane of glass do you 
think you could make away with the whole lot 
of it?” 

They whirled about together. “You bet we 
could!” they sang in unison, with a note of 
chipper certainty in their voices, a ring of 
assurance that added to the spoken words the 
footnote: “We could die eating candy, if we 
only had the chance.” 

Then they turned to the window again, the 
ecstatic look came back into their faces, and 
they stood rooted in delight. Their dream of 
life was complete, standing before the candy 
window and waiting for their chance. 

We smile at Tom and Jack as we reflect 


51 


The Candy-Store Dreamer 

how very far from their hoped-for chance at 
the candy the standing and the waiting will 
land them. We smile at them—and yet do 
we not ourselves do a decidedly similar thing? 
Does not every boy and every young man per¬ 
form more or less a la Tom and Jack? At 
home, at school, secluded from the blustering 
storms, unmindful of the real terrors of earth’s 
noises, with our backs to the world, do not all 
of us spend some years looking into a dream 
window of some supposed future? 

Each has his own particular style of win¬ 
dow to look at. All of us are in greater or less 
degree destined to be mistaken in what we 
image there. And yet in youth we are as fear¬ 
less and as expectant of the future as one day 
perhaps we shall be anxious and regretful for 
the past. 

Nor do I contend that it is entirely wrong to 
do this. It is in human nature, especially in 
young human nature, to hope for the impos¬ 
sible, to reach out for the impracticable, to 
build castles in the air. This is merely the sign 
that man is made for ultimately greater things 
than he will ever attain to here. It is a hint 
of his real power. 


52 


The Candy-Store Dreamer 

But the danger of the dream stage is that 
at the crisis of life the boy may not wake up 
from the dream, may never realize that he is 
looking in at the wrong window. He locates 
in front of the candy-store window in early 
life, and, when the time comes for him to 
move on, all the king’s horses will not budge 
him. His first dream is his last. With fatal 
obstinacy he decides once and forever for the 
candy window, and he will never look at an¬ 
other. And the boy who is building up for 
himself a candy-store future is making one of 
the worst mistakes that youth makes in this 
world. 

This is the boy who expects to attain results 
without effort. He will not have to go out 
to meet success. Success runs up to meet him. 
He sees his ripe talents, his faultless manners, 
his apt address, sweeping the field. He simply 
has to win. It will be easy for him—a very 
light task, sugar-sweet. 

Or perhaps he sees some work ahead, and he 
will do a little of that well. Merely a sample 
it will be, however, to advertise his prowess. 
After people see who he really is they will 
come right up and hand him things. Where- 



He sees himself “straightarming” the enemy— 

(Page 30} 




































































55 


The Candy-Store Dreamer 

upon he will launch into society. He will be 
a hero, moving through the throngs of stunned 
admirers with graciousness and elegance and 
easy affability, yet with that superior dignity 
and conscious power which only gods and 
heroes possess. He sees himself acclaimed in 
open compliment, or ill-concealed whisper, or 
cleverly veiled flattery, or “tumultuous ap¬ 
plause.” Some will be tactless enough to 
praise him to his face. He will endure that. 
Others will foolishly endeavor to imitate him. 
He will pity that. Others will look to him as 
sun-worshipers look to their god—with awe 
and reverent adoration. This is the intelligent 
way to applaud. He will accept this. 

Then he thinks of himself in detail, and he 
sees himself moving past every barrier, climb¬ 
ing every height, until he has reached the top¬ 
most pinnacle of social success. 

He sees himself in his motor car—a ten-thou- 
sand-dollar car at the cheapest—bowling 
luxuriously along the boulevard, taking the 
fresh air and the scenery as he moves ahead, 
leaving the dust and bewilderment to his 
natural inferiors. 

He sees himself at the opera, entering well 




56 The Candy-Store Dreamer 

on toward the middle of the first act, preceded 
by a marvelously gowned lady carrying more 
than the usual diamonds. The opera is inter¬ 
rupted. 

He sees himself on the golf links, a superb 
figure in immaculate flannels, leaning elegantly 
on his brassie, then moving with magnificent 
muscular motion over the green, while the 
gallery gasps at his driving, and gasps again at 
the man of Apollonian grace. 

He sees himself among the distinguished of 
the land, at brilliant receptions, at 4 ‘exclusive” 
functions, nonchalant, courtly, a poem of self- 
possession and tranquil ease. Crowds in¬ 
stinctively drift in his direction wherever he 
moves. Really, he cannot help it. 

He sees himself the host at elaborate din¬ 
ners planned as only the master plans, and 
carried out with the finest attention to detailed 
etiquette, yet not with the dullness that too 
often mars these feasts. His feasts are alive 
with pleasantry, a-sparkle with wit, gay with 
the keenest repartee, in which he always leads. 
Many celebrated personages attend, but, as 
satellites, they must be satisfied with simply 
attending, while the main planet shines. 


The Candy-Store Dreamer 57 

These are some of the dreams of the candy- 
store future—dreams that start with only a 
pane of glass between the dreamer and the 
dream, but a pane that will turn into a wall 
of infinite thickness if the dreamer does not 
awake and find he is looking in at the wrong 
window. 

It is no harm for little Tom and Jack to 
dream of a candy future. They will shortly 
leave the window and forget it in their tussle 
with the storm. The harm lies in the refusal 
of big Tom and big Jack to wake up at the 
higher call, to move away from that dream 
window, to step forth and to do battle for some 
cause worthy of themselves and useful to the 
world around them. 


ON COLD-STORAGE PIETY 


A SHORT time ago I met a young man, 
a friend, whom I had known very well 
as a boy at school. He had been a lively boy, 
verging even upon noisiness, but always reg¬ 
ular at his confessions and a frequent communi¬ 
cant. After a little survey of the time since 
our last meeting I asked him about his com¬ 
munions. 

“Oh,” he answered, “I’ve cut down on all 
that, Father.” 

“What’s the matter?” I inquired. “Doesn’t 
it fit in any longer?” 

“Yes, of course it fits in, but a fellow doesn’t 
need all that so much after college.” 

“How do you reach that conclusion?” I 
asked in astonishment. 

“Why, it’s this way,” he replied. “I did 
so much of it at school, went to confession and 
communion so often, that I don’t have to go 
often now. I don’t need it.” 

This young man had the idea that some¬ 
where in his spiritual system he had stored 



59 


On Cold-Storage Piety 

away a lot of piety, like meat and eggs and 
poultry in a cold-storage plant; and he thought 
that by some spiritual jugglery, in which he 
was altogether passive and took no part at all, 
these provisions would feed themselves into 
his soul without his reaching out a hand for 
them. 

“Oh, they’re there, all right,” he said to 
himself, “laid away safely on the shelves.” 

Where? Oh, he doesn’t know. Somewhere 
—any old where. 

Are the shelves easy to get at? He doesn’t 
know; doesn’t care, either. He doesn’t intend 
to grope in after the provisions. He doesn’t 
need to. They’ll come out by themselves when 
they’re wanted, like the cuckoo in the clock 
when the hour strikes. Just so, when tempta¬ 
tions come, his old prayers, his old efforts, re¬ 
sistance, his past confessions, communions, will 
appear automatically, reassert their former 
sway, and, like a night watchman, keep out the 
burglars while he goes right on sleeping. 

In a word, he isn’t a human being any more. 
He is a perpetual-motion machine. He used 
to have to make an effort to fight off tempta¬ 
tion, but now some mechanical device will fight 


60 On Cold-Storage Piety 

it off for him. It used to be difficult to be 
good. Now, with more temptations, it is easy. 

This sort of boy always goes to the bad at 
last. He is sure of himself, overconfident; he 
can’t lose. So he walks right into temptation, 
amid scenes and companions dangerous to 
faith, morals, decency even, until finally he 
finds himself in the mud, eating husks with the 
swine. 

The machine didn’t work in the way he had 
guaranteed it. It didn’t turn out the prayers, 
the watching, and the fighting-power, auto¬ 
matically. The old prayers did not ward off 
the new temptations. The old confessions did 
not forgive the new sins. The cold-storage 
plant burned down somehow—and very often 
keeps on burning in the next world. 

The fact is, there is no such thing as cold- 
storage piety. By constant attention, indeed, 
we do get strong in soul, but never so strong 
that we can stop strengthening, nourishing, 
repairing, defending. And the stronger we 
get, the more of these we need. A tree, for 
example, needs much more moisture, much 
more root space, more air space, when it is 
full grown than when it is a twig. A flower 


61 


On Cold-Storage Piety 

gets more attention when blooming than when 
it was first put in as a seed. And we have all 
heard the story of the man who trained his 
horse to go without eating, on the supposition 
that as a colt he had eaten all he would need for 
life. The man did train the horse, all right, 
but, as the story finishes, “as soon as he got 
used to going without eating he died.” 

The same idea is borne out in our own body. 
The more powerful the human body, the more 
food it requires; the more it is growing, the 
more nourishment it requires; the harder it 
works, the more insistently it calls for the rein¬ 
forcement of food, merely to sustain it. And 
when the body calls for no food we know it is 
sick. 

Young Jack has been out playing baseball 
all day, and after he gets home he hears the 
voice of mother calling: “Come to dinner, 
Jack.” 

“Thank you, mamma, but I’ve had dinner.” 

“Why, where did you get your dinner?” 

“Oh, right here.” 

“Why, you’ve just come in. When could 
you have had dinner?” 

“Oh, not to-day, mamma. But don’t you 


62 On Cold-Storage Piety 

recollect last Christmas? You gave me a 
lovely dinner.” 

Of course. Jack’s mother becomes alarmed 
and calls in the head specialist. 

But Jack was merely using the cold storage 
argument, the very same argument that our 
friend we talked with at the beginning was 
using. And if it looks foolish enough in Jack 
to make his mother call for the doctor, how 
much help do you think a man needs when he 
deliberately applies the starvation theory to 
his soul instead of his body? Much more than 
anything else in the world does our soul need 
steady and frequent nourishing. For beyond 
anything we know here it lives, grows, acts 
powerfully, swiftly, and constantly, and with 
an incomparably more vivid and burning in¬ 
tensity than any flower or tree or animal. Con¬ 
stant care, therefore, and minute attention are 
needed to watch the fuel we furnish this fire, 
to measure the food we give this gigantic 
being. 

And the soul itself must reach out for this 
nourishment. The tree and the flower and the 
animal may be fed, and forcibly fed. Not so 
with the soul. No outside force can drive it. 


63 


On Cold-Storage Piety 

The soul must itself reach out, and everything 
depends on that one first movement. 

Our own everyday experience tells us that all 
this is true; that we are not ahead of the game. 
We know that we do not resist to-day’s tempta¬ 
tion merely with the prayer and the effort of 
yesterday. We know that daily temptation 
must be met with a new spiritual strength, 
and that we cannot omit trying to-day simply 
because we have tried yesterday. “Give us 
this day our daily bread,” we pray. Observe 
the repetition of the idea in the two words 
“day” and “daily.” It must be food for every 
day, and new food, at that. 

The saints tell us the same thing. St. Paul 
kept asking for prayers and help continually, 
lest he might become a castaway. St. Philip 
Neri at the beginning of each day asked the 
Lord to watch him carefully or he would cer¬ 
tainly betray his Master. 

Make up our minds now, that in later life 
we are going to take even greater care of our¬ 
selves than when we were at home or school. 
In youth we are in a certain sense automati¬ 
cally taken care of, put into a routine in which 
holy thoughts, prayer, the power and beauty 


64 On Cold-Storage Piety 

of virtue steadily meet us and influence us. 
Later it will be different, as far as these ex¬ 
ternal helps go. The guiding hand, the en¬ 
couraging word, the warning glance, will to 
a great extent have disappeared. Much of the 
early scaffolding that was necessary in our up¬ 
building will be removed, as, indeed, God in¬ 
tends that it should be removed. But the 
great buttresses and the sure foundation must 
remain forever through our whole life, every 
minute of the day and hour. God’s hand 
should still overshadow us, His words of wis¬ 
dom still guide us, His look still penetrate us 
through and through with its strength and its 
glory and its eternal sweetness. 


GET A LADDER 


P ROFESSOR WALKER understood his 
class. As a naural result his class under¬ 
stood Professor Walker. If he praised his 
boys, which he wasn’t a bit ashamed to do, or 
if he blamed them, which he did rapidly and 
efficiently, ninety-nine times out of a hundred 
the boys would see there was a reason for it. 
Results were plentiful. 

But of course there came times when results 
were ragged. Heavy slumps in early fall and 
late spring forced the Professor into using 
tactics he didn’t particularly relish—namely, 
strategy. And this was the one time out of a 
hundred his boys did not see the reason for the 
Professor’s movements—until, say, a year or 
two afterward. Then they used to admit, with 
a kind of plaintive humor, that “Walker was 
some strategist.” 

It seemed so simple, too, his method. An 
example: One day, just after the first quar¬ 
terly exams had revealed a frightful condi¬ 
tion of mental rheumatics in his class, Pro- 

65 


66 


Get a Ladder 


fessor Walker came into class wearing what 
the romance writers call an “illuminated smile/’ 
It was a smile which, while indicating that its 
owner fully realized the desperate condition 
of affairs, also revealed that he had suddenly 
hit upon a complete solution—a sun-coming- 
from-behind-the-clouds effect. It took the 
class off guard. They had expected him to 
enter in a Hamlet’s soliloquy mood, with per¬ 
haps an added dash of King Lear in the storm 
scene, and they had braced themselves for the 
worst. But this entrance, 

Artless as the air 
And candid as the skies, 

knocked them right back of the knee joints. 
They sagged heavily. 

The Professor spoke. 

“Boys, we are about to begin the second 
quarter of the school year, and I wish here 
to call your attention to a branch we have woe¬ 
fully neglected during the past two months, 
and that is—” 

“Greek!” said A1 Thompson, in a weary 
voice. 

“Mathematics!” groaned Tom Alberts and 



Get a Ladder 


67 

Bill McDermott, whose marks hovered around 
the freezing point in geometry. 

“Latin!” wailed a chorus in the corner, who 
had offered as a class yell, “What’s the use of 
Latin?” 

The Professor went on again: 

“And that is—good English reading.” 

“What? Reading!” came from a dozen 
hoys, striking attitudes after the manner of 
actors in the denouement of a melodrama. The 
class writhed in agony, partly real. 

If there is one thing more than another that 
a boy—or, for that matter, anybody else— 
hates, it is to be lectured upon reading. It real¬ 
ly is taking an unfair advantage to unroll be¬ 
fore any one the vasty deep of books, to stand 
him alone there on the shore, forcibly to adjust 
his head photographer-fashion, until he can’t 
miss seeing the horrible welter, and then to 
stand beside him and to say, “Look there, 
Ignorance!” Every one of those books be¬ 
comes a family skeleton which he would like 
to forget, but isn’t allowed to. He is caught 
in a state of red-handed stupidity, and branded 
“Defective” on his forehead with an anni¬ 
hilating distinctness. 




68 


Get a Ladder 


A boy, in particular, regards a list of books 
with the same cheerfulness that he shows in 
contemplating a row of headstones in a grave¬ 
yard, and he dubs a lecture on reading ^high¬ 
brow stuff,” which means that it is open to sus¬ 
picion and very likely contempt. 

But Professor Walker did not plan either 
a lecture or a list of books. He simply waited 
at the desk, and he waited not in vain. 

“Professor,” said Steve Pomeroy. Steve 
was the “cool boy” of the class, upon whom 
the others depended to put forth a smooth, 
even argument in a crisis. “This isn’t the time 
to hit us on reading.” (Murmurs of approval 
from the class.) “We re in an awful fix right 
now.” (A low moan from the class.) We’ve 
all got to make up after exams. There’s a row 
of us went down in Latin.” (Exemplifications 
in sections of the class.) “And think of those 
flunks in Greek!” (“Oh!” from the class.) 
“And the way w r e were bowled over in Mathe¬ 
matics!” (“Ah!” from the class.) “Besides, a 
lot of us are weak in branches. We want to 
come back, and we haven’t the time for extras 
now.” 

“No time, no time!” echoed the class. 



It is plain their son is not interested in them. 

(Page 150 ) 














Get a Ladder 


71 


Professor Walker heard Steve through, and 
didn’t notice the echoes at all. Placidly he 
took the cue furnished by the sufferers. 

‘‘On the contrary, Steve” (Professor 
Walker called his boys by their first names, 
which made them feel comfortable, even in 
their misery), “on the contrary, it is the 
very time to talk about reading. You want to 
do better, to ‘come back,’ as you put it; to ad¬ 
vance where you have been retreating, or to 
go faster where you have been doing well. How 
will you do this? By following the law for all 
advance; namely, by doing more than the work 
that is absolutely required. In a game of base¬ 
ball you don’t absolutely have to make more 
than one base on a two-base hit. The umpire 
won’t call you out for staying at first base, but 
the team and the crowd will call you worse than 
out if you try it. In football you don’t have 
to make more than ten yards to keep the ball. 
But if you went your ten yards and then, 
gently placing the ball on the chalk-line, waited 
for the other team to come up and shake hands 
with you, imagine what the young ladies wav¬ 
ing pennants in the grandstand would think of 


72 


Get a Ladder 


“Columbus didn’t have to discover Amer¬ 
ica, Steve; but he did extra work, and so 
achieved what he actually wanted to achieve. 
So with your mind. The class has partially 
lost it, according to their own confession. We 
shall rediscover it by going in for all the Latin, 
mathematics, and the rest, plus something 
which I name to be English Reading. We’ve 
simply got to do the first, and the only way to 
be sure of it is by adding on the second.” 

“Oh, now he’s going to make us wade 
through a lot of that highbrow stuff!” wailed 
Teddy Quinn, in a piercing aside. 

“Well, suppose even that,” the Professor 
said, answering the wail. “As long as one 
doesn’t get in over one’s ears—” 

“Quinn’ll never get in over his ears,” inter¬ 
jected Ted’s particular friend, Tom Cam¬ 
pion. 

“Ah, cancel it!” retorted Quinn. 

“Hush, child,” said Professor Walker. 

“Rut anyhow, Professor, isn’t Quinn more 
than half right?” said Steve Pomeroy, again 
taking up the cudgels. “Looking things 
squarely in the face, isn’t this highbrow stuff 
dull at best—dry discussions, and dreary 


Get a Ladder 


73 


descriptions, and conversations about as in¬ 
teresting as poking up sand with a stick? I’ve 
tried it, and I can’t even understand a lot of 
it, much less get interested; and I’ve come to 
the conclusion that this old classic stuff is bound 
to be dull.” 

(Suppressed cheers from the class.) 

“You have just now used two words, Steve,” 
answered the Professor, “that I intended to 
call the class’s attention to. I am glad you 
brought them in. They are the word ‘old’ and 
the word ‘classic.’ Evidently you meant them 
for slurs on any book. But are they? The 
word ‘old,’ for example: Isn’t the very fact 
that a book is old one of its strongest titles 
to consideration? You hear of a business 
house advertising itself as being in business 
for fifty years; of a bank ‘established 1789’; 
of a university ‘founded 1674’—all boldly an¬ 
nouncing their age, proud to be old. 

“And we ourselves, do we not instinctively 
choose to deal with these in preference to young 
business houses, young banks, young universi¬ 
ties? Why? Precisely because they are old; 
because they have stood the test of time and 
have proved themselves strong and dependable. 


74 


Get a Ladder 


Indeed, we call them ‘old’ because they aren’t 
old at all. Other things around them have 
grown old and have disappeared, but they re¬ 
main perennially young, better to-day than 
ever. It is the same with ‘old’ books. They 
have stood all tests. And one of the tests of 
any good book is that it be not dull. 

“Then the word ‘classic.’ We mean to in¬ 
sult a book when we call it a classic. But do 
we? What is a classic? Something that has 
‘class’ to it, that’s all. We call a horse race a 
classic when the entries are the pick of the 
country. Crowds flock to it, especially the 
experts in horses. It is the most interesting 
event of the year. We say a baseball team 
has ‘class’ when its players are individually 
skillful and have the intelligence to work to¬ 
gether. If a player cannot do this, he retires 
to the ‘bush league,’ where he tries to get the 
skill he needs to enable him to return to where 
the ‘class’ is. 

“It is the same with the books we call classics. 
They are the books that have ‘class,’ that are 
interesting, and that draw the crowds of ex¬ 
perts, the men who know things.” 

“But I don’t want to be an expert,” cried 


Get a Ladder 


Eddie Porter, in a voice which seemed near 
the breaking point. 

“Then leave school,” calmly continued Pro¬ 
fessor Walker. “You wish to be a ‘bush 
leaguer.’ Then get back into the bush and 
stay there picking weeds and eating acorns.” 

“Wuff!”—a delighted grunt from Joe Mul¬ 
ligan, which brought a withering glare from 
Eddie. 

“But,” interposed A1 Lardner, “suppose we 
did wish to be experts, then why do we find 
those books dull if you say they are interest- 

mg? 

“You don’t find them dull,” answered the 
Professor. “You find yourself dull. You take 
up a really fine book, an ‘old classic,’ and it 
shows you up. You are behind it and below it 
so far that you can’t touch it. The book is all 
right—strong, swift, clever—but you are un¬ 
able to tackle it. It gets by you.” 

“What’ll we do, then?” asked Tom Gamble 
in pathetic desperation. 

“For one thing,” answered the Professor, 
“do not stand around boohooing, with your 
little fists in your eyes, and saying, “It ran 
right around me!’ Get after it, catch it, and 




76 


Get a Ladder 


make it stop for you. If you are below it, do 
what the bad small hoy does for the jam. 
Reach up for it. Get a chair, if necessary, or 
a ladder; but get it. 

“The big trouble with our reading is that we 
don’t care to take any trouble with it. In that 
case books will never be our friends. If we 
take no trouble for our friends we shall find 
that we have no friends. 

“Suppose yourself on a visit to a friend. 
You enter, choose the easiest chair in the room 
and loll back. Enters the friend. You re¬ 
main languidly seated, shake his hand in wear¬ 
ied fashion, utter not a word. Your friend, 
wondering, asks: 

“ ‘What can I do for you?’ 

“ T came to have you entertain me , 5 you an¬ 
swer. ‘Please jump up on the piano, George, 
and make a funny noise with your feet on the 
keys. Then take that statuette and see if you 
can hit the house in that oil painting. Then 
whistle and dance for me. And after that 
please set the house on fire. I like fires. You 
do all the entertaining, George, and let it be 
spectacular. I’ll sit here as long as I can and 
watch you.’ 


Get a Ladder 


77 


“It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Yet that is 
the way we read, often. We open the book 
and expect entertainment without effort. The • 
only condition we put is that the entertainment 
be something crazy. Y* r e do not wish to meet 
ideas, people, characters. W'e look for Punch- 
and-Judy shows, Jacks-in-the-box, circus pa¬ 
rades, hair-breadth diversions succeeding each 
other with vaudevillian rapidity and vapidity, 
and never daring to ask our mind to put forth 
any effort. 

“A book is a friend. We must take trouble 
for it, go out to meet it, try to get its point of 
view. Therefore give it leisure; don’t hurry 
it; become thoroughly acquainted with it, and 
we will find that, like a real friend, it improves 
upon acquaintance. 

“As for us, too often we want only the 'pink 
sheet’ or the 'green sheet,’ until our mind takes 
on their color. If any one said to you, ‘What 
a lovely pink complexion you have!’ I imagine 
you would blush and resent the implication that 
you looked like a 'sissy.’ And if any one said, 
'How green you look!’ perhaps you would chal¬ 
lenge him to a duel. 

“Yet I am afraid that after basking in the 


78 


Get a Ladder 


reflections of the ‘pink’ and the 'green’ our 
minds very often take on those colors—or a 
horrible mixture of both—and become soft and 
stupid at the same time. 

"I do not absolutely bar light reading, under¬ 
stand. But I say, do not let light reading bar 
you from the books that are worth while, the 
'old classics,’ which call for activity of mind, 
for virility, energy, drive; the books that pre¬ 
serve us from being like expectant infants, 
with their little tongues out, waiting for some¬ 
body to feed them with nice, soft pap, and per¬ 
fectly contented, if the pap is fed to them, to 
go on thus holding their little mouths open for¬ 
ever.” 

“Ouch!” said Tom Gamble, out loud. 

“We shall now open our Ciceros,” said the 
Professor, arctically. 



THE MISFITS 


W HEN a door is locked that leads into a 
room we wish to enter, what do we do? 
We do not at once take down the door nor re¬ 
move the lock. We try to get a key that will 
tit the lock; and if the key does not fit we file 
the wards until it does fit. 

When we are using a new baseball glove for 
the first time, breaking it in, we find that it 
does not hold the ball well. What do we do? 
We do not take a bat and pound the ball into a 
jelly, but we keep at the glove till we have 
worn a little pocket in it to receive the ball. 

When we are dealing with a limb disjointed 
through some accident, we do not push the 
body around to make it adjust itself to the 
limb. We pull the limb back to the body and 
make it fall into place again. 

“What is all this about?” you ask. 

Well, if we view it at a certain angle, it is 
all about ourselves. We come into this world 
with but one great business to attend to— 

namely, to fit ourselves into life, rightly to ad- 

79 



80 


The Misfits 

just ourselves to things as we find them. And 
sometimes we are like the key, active, aggres¬ 
sive, starting things; sometimes like the glove, 
passive, enduring severe blows; and, again, we 
are like the disjointed limb, which first suffers 
a strong pull to get it into place, and, after 
that, is energetic in the use of its full power. 

But no matter which one of the three we 
happen to be imitating, we are always supposed 
to be doing our best to fit in with the situation. 
The sooner we learn this fundamental idea, and 
get to work to put it into practice, the more 
sense we reveal and the greater the amount of 
good we finally accomplish. One of the hard¬ 
est criticisms we pass on a man in any line of 
work is, “He is a misfit.” It implies absolute 
incompetence, hurtful to others as well as to 
himself. 

“Yes, yes,” puts in Happy Hal at this junc¬ 
ture. “Terrible thing, these misfit men. But 
I’m not a man yet, so you’re not talking to me. 
Believe me, when I am a man I’ll be no misfit. 
I needn’t worry yet, though, as I’m only a col¬ 
lege boy.” And Happy Hal whistles a bar or 
two of “College Chums.” 

Believe me, son, you’re the very one I am 


81 


The Misfits 

talking to. If you do not learn to fit in while 
you are at school you needn’t expect to fit in 
after your school is over. The fitting-in idea 
is the very backbone of school training. It is 
more important than all the branches of study 
taken together, because it is the thing that gives 
these branches their meaning and their cohesive 
power. I have seen brilliant, original boys at 
school turn into miserable misfits in after years; 
and contrariwise, I have known boys who kept 
moving ahead at a snail’s pace in their classes 
develop into men of astonishing power and mo¬ 
mentum. The reason ? The first kind of boys 
didn’t fit in: the second did. Branches in a 
school are only the loose bricks. The fitting-in 
ability is the mortar that holds those bricks to¬ 
gether and builds them into a strong, dependa¬ 
ble wall. 

“But what does this ‘fitting in’ mean?” you 
ask. “I don’t quite grasp the idea.” 

To put the idea compactly, “fitting in” 
means that in every essential duty, mental, 
moral, social, the boy is found in the right 
place. We may illustrate this idea by com¬ 
paring what is expected from a boy with what 
is expected from each member, say, of a base- 


82 


The Misfits 

ball team. Suppose in a game of ball there is 
a man on first base, one out, and the batter 
hits a ball down to the shortstop. He takes 
the ball, tosses it to the second baseman, and 
the latter, whirling, sends the ball with perfect 
accuracy to first base. The ball shoots directly 
over the base and on till stopped by the fence. 

The first baseman—oh, where is he? They 
look around and discover him away over in 
front of the grand-stand! After the inning, to 
the captain’s heated demand for an explana¬ 
tion of this weird behavior the baseman an¬ 
swers thus: 

“Pardon me, but just as Crawford hit the 
ball I observed that a lady in the grand-stand 
had dropped her score card into the field, and I 
went over to get it and hand it back to her.” 

There is a misfit! And no game, no enter¬ 
prise of any kind has room for misfits. What 
is wanted, and what must be had before suc¬ 
cess is possible, is that each person in the sys¬ 
tem be in his proper place at all times, no mat¬ 
ter what may be the temptation to leave it. 
That is “fitting in.” 

And so at school. A boy enters school, and 
the first thing he notices is that a certain defi- 



83 


The Misfits 

nite system is in force. Certain laws of con¬ 
duct are laid down; the studies follow a fixed 
routine: so many days per week of class, so 
many hours of preparation required, special 
methods of study followed, various customs in 
possession, an approved number of societies 
and organizations he may join and support. It 
is a full-fledged, time-tried system; and into 
this system he is supposed to fit. 

Now, in this process he will be unlike the 
key and the glove and the disjointed limb. 
These, each in its own way, fit in, but chiefly 
through the application of some outside force 
to which they must respond. The school system 
applies a force from outside, it is true, but it 
isn’t a compelling force. It is merely a persua¬ 
sive, a moral force; which means that if the boy 
makes up his mind not to respond to it he can¬ 
not be forced. Ultimately, therefore, it is his 
part to compel himself, to fit himself in. 

And exactly here becomes evident the dif¬ 
ference between a sensible student and a misfit. 
One boy looks, sees, understands the require¬ 
ments, and immediately gets to work on him¬ 
self. The other boy will not look, until some¬ 
body takes him by the back of the neck and 


84 


The Misfits 

holds his eye right over the difficulty. Then 
he shuts both eyes, and they have to be pried 
open, like an oyster. Then he refuses to un¬ 
derstand—too much head work. And even 
when he does understand he declines to feed 
himself into the system of college life. 

The result is that he has to be filed down, 
pounded, pulled into joint; at which the poor 
child sulks, kicks, paws up the floor, cries out 
that he is persecuted, and goes home and tells 
father and mother, especially mother, that he 
isn’t “getting a square deal.” All the while he 
feels like a martyr. From the deeps of his 
soul great sobs, like bubbles, burst on the sur¬ 
face, and he knows he could sing the beautiful 
ballad “Nobody’s Darling” with a pathos that 
would call for large handkerchiefs in the vast 
audience. This is one boy who fits in nowhere 
at school, and, unless he learns, is wanted no¬ 
where in the world. 

Another kind of boy at school reminds one 
very much of little Tommie Smithers. Tommie 
stood at his front gate in the calm evening air, 
feeling great. He gave nine echoing ’rahs for 
his father, nine for his mother, and nine for his 
sisters and his cousins and his aunts, closing 



85 


The M is fits 

with a ripping “tiger” for the whole family. 

Just then Tommie’s father put his head out 
of the door and said: 

“That’s enough of that, Tommie. Come in, 
now, and get up the coal.” 

Tommie staggers back aghast, leans his head 
like a lily against the gate-post, and two real 
tears, like gems, stand in his eyes. After that 
magnificent vocal exhibition in the family 
praise, to be called upon to carry coal! 
“Father doesnjt understand me, that’s clear.” 

Any boys like this in college? Surely. 
They are the single-branch specialists, who 
choose one thing out of eight or nine that they 
are expected to do, and call it a college course. 
And the one thing they choose is noise-making. 
Only to hear their frenzied shouts at college 
games! 

“Gee, but we have a wonderful team!” 

Enthusiasm foams up, swirls around, 
splashes on all sides. 

“Once more! Three cheers for Alma 
Mater! Tiger-r-r-r!” His jungle work is 
perfect. 

Next morning Professor Driver asks him 
for his Latin theme. 


86 The Misfits 

“What? You can’t mean it!” And he 
turns upon the professor a look of gazelle-like 
surprise, slowly hardening into a stern, movie- 
hero resentment, as who should say, “Me, the 
great Lung Artist, to dig into the obscurity of 
a Latin dictionary! What’s this college com¬ 
ing to, anyway?” 

He expects the college to fit him; imagines, 
indeed, that he is conferring a favor on the 
school by his simple presence. As far as he can 
see, he is the only one around the place who 
has any college spirit, and his general attitude 
toward the faculty plainly says, “They need 
me at this school.” 

The fact is the Rabid Rooter knows noth¬ 
ing of college spirit. Genuine college spirit 
means the spirit of the college, getting the col¬ 
lege point of view, not on one thing, but on all 
the things the college considers essential to its 
training; and, after that, not waiting to be 
hammered into position, but fitting ourselves in 
freely, though under due guidance. 

Looking at matters thus, we see that we 
have to fit in correctly with studies, with com¬ 
panions, with the faculty, with the Ten Com¬ 
mandments, the sacraments, and our devotions, 


87 


The Misfits 

as well as with the societies, the games, and all 
the customs of the school. All these too must 
be considered, not successively, but simulta¬ 
neously. Each is to be adjusted always in view 
of the others, and emphasis laid on each accord¬ 
ingly. For undue attention to, or neglect of, 
any one of them may mean failure in all. 

To finish a college course successfully is to 
do a complicated piece of work, and no one can 
do it well but one who has the real desire to 
fit himself in, who studies the college spirit and 
adapts himself to it carefully. 


ON A PRIEST’S VOCATION 


I WISH to say something in this talk about 
vocation, and vocation to the priesthood. 
And I am not going to take the standpoint of 
exhorting or persuading you to the priesthood 
—though I certainly do think that every boy 
who ever plans a great and useful future for 
himself should look long and seriously at this 
career—but I am going to explain simply just 
what a priest’s vocation means, just what kind 
of life a priest leads. 

It is of course important for all Catholics to 
grasp the idea of the priesthood, and, as a gen¬ 
eral thing, they do. In sickness and at the hour 
of death, when sin oppresses and in every spir¬ 
itual crisis, Catholics reach out for the priest 
and depend upon him. And from our own ex¬ 
perience we know what the priest actually ac¬ 
complishes for them. In our own case, for ex¬ 
ample, what should we be, morally and men¬ 
tally, were it not for the priest? Outside of 
our father and mother he is the closest person 

to us in the whole world. And in some ways 

88 



On a Priest's Vocation 


89 


lie is even closer to us than they—in those 
ways, namely, in which he takes the place and 
acts in the name of God, who is nearer to us 
than father or mother. 

And yet boys often do not get close enough 
to the priest, until it is late, maybe too late. 
Why is this? Well, shyness on the boy’s part 
is sometimes one reason. But in many cases 
it is because we think the priest does not under¬ 
stand our case. 

We have an idea that the priest knows the 
theory of things pretty well, but that he doesn’t 
get near the actual concrete facts. In our ideas 
of a priest we travel back to his boyhood, and 
we picture him as a pathetic, pale, remote, 
far-eyed individual, who has stood apart from 
boys and men ever since he was able to stand at 
all; who has been dreaming dreams, and bur¬ 
rowing into books, and praying in an incessant, 
but machine-like and gloomy manner that 
alienates our sympathy altogether. We fancy 
him as one who cannot see a joke at all, who 
looks with pain, or with a kind of sad tolera¬ 
tion, upon games and frolics and fun and 
laughter and all red-blooded life of whatever 
description. 



90 On a Priest's Vocation 

This gray shadow befogs our whole idea of 
a priest as we interpret him in his later life. 
For, we say, the boy is father of the man; and 
so the strange, mysterious boy develops into 
the sad, stern, remote man—a man who doesn’t 
grasp hard facts, but who, after being forced 
all his life into a groove, retaliates, when he 
gets the chance, by forcing every one else into 
a similar groove. 

Let me answer this idea at once, by saying 
that it is all wrong, absolutely contrary to the 
actual facts. Among the very happiest, the 
most care-free, most contented, red-blooded 
boys I knew were those who later became 
priests—boys who played all the games, and 
played them fiercely; who shouted and yelled 
and coached and “kicked” on the umpire’s de¬ 
cisions as wildly as any boy that ever lived. 
They fought their books too, and generally 
won there also. They were, moreover, boys 
who had their own original and decided ideas, 
and were not afraid to defend them in their 
clubs, or societies, or debates. In a word, 
whether in games or out of them, they were 
workers all the time, very much alive to every¬ 
thing that was going ahead, fully abreast of 


On a Priest's Vocation 91 

the first line of march, and always popular 
among their fellows. 

“But,” it will be urged, “is it not the truth 
right now, at any rate, that the priest is re¬ 
mote, no matter what he was as a boy? He 
cannot do as he likes; he must be always pray¬ 
ing, always in a groove. He is alone, and his 
life is dull and uninteresting.” 

Let us take up these objections one by one. 

“The priest cannot do as he likes.”—No¬ 
body can do as he likes. How could we trust 
any man who acted on the idea of doing as he 
liked? Such a man, in whatever sphere he 
works, is bound to turn out a selfish, intolerable 
tyrant who will certainly ruin everything he 
touches. We love any man and trust him ex¬ 
actly in proportion as he shows himself con¬ 
stant in doing what he doesn’t like. And that 
is precisely why we love the priest and cling 
to him—because he has sworn, and has set him¬ 
self to fulfill it, that he will never do as he likes, 
never put his personal preference above our 
own, that in our every emergency we shall be 
his main interest, and that, at any cost of time 
or convenience or safety, he will devote his life 
to helping us to do as God likes. 



92 


On a Priest's Vocation 


“He must always be praying.”—So must 
everybody. Our Lord has told us that we 
must “pray always,” and He did not limit the 
command to priests. Each one must pray as 
best suits him, but we must always, in some 
sense, have our hearts lifted up to God. If it 
is meant, however, by “praying always” that 
the priest leads a strange, abstracted, moody, 
absent-minded life, nothing could be farther 
from the truth. No one is more alive and alert 
than the priest with his people. 

“In a groove.”—Some people have the idea 
that priests are molded like clay in a pottery, 
or lathe-turned like furniture in a factory. 
They think that, if truth were told, priests have 
been browbeaten into the life, from their youth 
up hounded by parents, nagged by relatives, 
labeled by candid friends. This is not true 
either. Vocation works at last from the inside 
out, not from the outside in. True, there is a 
“calling.” But it is God that calls, and the 
final answer is freely given from the heart of 
the boy, with God’s grace helping him. These 
two, and only these, do all the work of voca¬ 
tion. The priest chooses his life under the in¬ 
spiration of grace, and he likes it, not because 
it is a “dull life,” but— 



On a Priest's Vocation 93 

Because, even from a human standpoint, it 
is the most interesting of all careers. The 
priest seems to be alone, and in a sense he is— 
in the sense that he has no family ties, no ex¬ 
clusive friendships. But this results in the 
widest possible field of action for him, varied, 
constant, and, in the highest degree, important. 
Apparently alone, he is in reality closely and 
sympathetically united with every one under 
his charge. He knows that he alone can render 
to his people the only indispensable service 
they require—soul aid. His great interest is 
the souls of men. 

If other men get interested in real estate, 
in gold mines, table salt, vegetable gardens, 
fish, trees, oil, street cars, what about the inter¬ 
est attaching to human souls, a single one of 
which is more valuable, important, interesting, 
noble, than all those put together? Even the 
money kings see this at last, in a vague way. 
They tire of the coin stacks and, with a grop¬ 
ing instinct of doing something better and 
higher, they turn philanthropists. They build 
libraries, hospitals, laboratories, with a new 
kind of eagerness in their older years. It is the 
tacit confession that the greatest work in the 
world is helping souls, and, though they mess 



94 


On a Priest's Vocation 


things up pretty badly, it comforts them to 
think that they are lifting themselves out of the 
sordid pit of selfishness. 

No; the priest, though not rushing about 
with visible speed, is nevertheless very much 
alive; very active, though not disturbed about 
it; very able, the only one on earth entirely 
able, to care for souls, though he does it with¬ 
out advertising; and very much attached to all 
souls, ready to lose his life for any one of them 
if such a need arose. 

These are facts we ought to know and upon 
which we ought to act. In our daily life we 
ought to feel that we can get close to the priest, 
confide in him, attach ourselves to him as to one 
who will easily understand us and kindly co¬ 
operate with us. 

If we think our vocation leads us to be 
priests, let us be assured it is a call to be warm¬ 
hearted and happy, not to be cold and dreary; 
to be near human life, not remote from it; to 
be interested, not to be dull. And finally, it is 
a vocation in which the faithful worker cannot 
help laying up treasure for himself in heaven, 
the treasure of priceless souls that Christ has 
redeemed and that the priest has cared for and 
brought back to Him. 


ON ADDING MACHINES 


And seek not you what you shall eat or what 
you shall drink . But seek ye first the kingdom 
of God and His justice .— St. Luke. 

S EEKING is an impulse in man’s nature, 
and it shows itself from our earliest years. 
The little girl just past the crawling age seeks 
a sawdust doll, and clings to it tenaciously 
until it is blackened and battered beyond rec¬ 
ognition. Then she seeks to find out how dolly 
lived so long without food, and she drags the 
sawdust out of it. 

The little boy seeks a toy engine, and after 
he has it and speeds it up and down its little 
track until he is weary, he seeks to find out 
what it is on the inside that makes the engine 
go. In a jiffy it is all apart. 

And as youth comes in, this tendency, from 
an indeliberate, becomes a deliberate tendency. 
The boy, the young man, seeks to see things, 
to know things. He wishes to find out what 
the world is doing. He mingles with the 
crowd, craves new experiences, runs after 
pleasures, desires to travel from place to place. 

95 


N 


96 On Adding Machines 

And as he tires of one thing he seeks another. 

With maturer years the seeking goes on. 
And now it is for power, or influence, or dig¬ 
nity. He has fewer objects of pursuit now and 
is more steady and less noisy in their quest, 
but the intensity of interest in the chase re¬ 
mains, becomes even more intense as it settles 
along deeper grooves. 

Then age enters, and with it the search for 
repose, for undisturbed tranquillity; and the 
old man seeks to avoid the whirl just as ar¬ 
dently as the young man seeks to plunge into 
it. 

From childhood to old age the seeking goes 
on, either for good or for evil. Always it will 
be one or the other, but the seeking impulse 
runs through everything. And in one way or 
another it is always for self, a continuous reach¬ 
ing out for something for ourselves. 

“Is this right?” you will ask. “Does it not 
seem selfish to live a life such as this?” 

T es, it is selfish. But that does not mean 
that seeking is essentially wrong. For it is a 
part of God’s plan that we should be selfish. 
He has judged us worth the great price of His 
blood, and it is His desire that we appreciate 
our worth. Self-esteem, then, and self-seeking 


On Adding Machines 97 

is a duty of our lives. But this must be fol¬ 
lowed out according to God’s plan, and not ac¬ 
cording to our plan. Christ tells us that man 
is and must be a seeker, and while recognizing 
the two ways in which he seeks, tells us which 
of the two we must choose. 

“Seek not you what you shall eat or what 
you shall drink.” That is to say: Not a sen¬ 
sual life, nor a society career, nor fine clothes, 
nor money, nor notoriety, is the proper object 
of our pursuit. But “seek ye first the kingdom 
of God and His justice,” God’s service, God’s 
law, and as much as we need of the other things 
will drift in of themselves. That is the differ¬ 
ence in the seeking. One way is to seek for 
ourselves and forget God. The other way is 
to seek God and trust Him to care for us after 
that. One of these ways is evil, the other good. 

And this is the touchstone of self-knowledge. 
Do you wish to know what kind of boy you are 
and how you stand with God ? Then ask your¬ 
self what you are seeking. Toward which of 
these two lives are you leaning? What is the 
whole drift of your actions? In which direc¬ 
tion are you driving your soul? 

To give ourselves the right answer to this 
question is not as easy as it seems. To find 


98 On Adding Machines 

out what we actually are requires examination. 

“But I do examine,” you interrupt. “I ex¬ 
amine my conscience as to my actions every 
month, every week, at confession. Besides, at 
my night prayers I count up my mistakes— 
when I don’t forget. That is taking pretty 
good care to find myself out, don’t you think 
so?” 

Yes, it is what we might call good care, pro¬ 
vided we count up all our mistakes. But did 
you ever notice while counting that we are 
dealing with the same mistakes week after 
week and month after month? They don’t 
seem to change at all, those mistakes, some of 
them serious. Isn’t that a sign that somewhere 
inside us there is a big mistake that we are fail¬ 
ing to get, failing to seek even, because we 
suspect it is there and are partial to it ? 

It is a sure sign that in the constant and un¬ 
diminished repetition of the same old sins we 
are losing a big fault somewhere, and that we 
really don’t know ourselves as well as we 
thought we did. We think we have done 
enough when we recount our sins, resolve to do 
better, and repeat this process indefinitely. 
But this isn’t nearly enough. The truth is that 
the real work is hardly begun at the counting 


On Adding Machines 99 

stage. We have been merely enumerating 
symptoms; we have not diagnosed the disease. 
Let me outline for you a few obvious little 
parables. 

Oliver was a boy who had a garden to care 
for, and every morning he used to find a tiny 
ridge zigzagging all over the garden. And he 
took a spade and flattened out the ridge nicely. 
Sometimes in the afternoon there were more 
ridges. He smoothed these too. They were 
mole tracks. And he kept faithfully at the 
task for ninety-seven days, until the summer 
was over. Of course, Ollie’s garden was over 
long before. 

Clara was a little girl who loved canary 
birds. If Clara didn’t have a canary bird in 
the house she would slowly pine away. But 
every week, and sometimes twice a week, when 
she came downstairs in the morning, she would 
find in the cage only a bunch of yellow feathers. 
“Just think,” she remarked to her mamma at 
breakfast one morning, “to-morrow I shall be 
on my fourteenth canary!” 

Mr. Reachup was a neighborhood grocer 
who had arrived at the cash-register stage. He 
also employed several clerks. And the cash 
register didn’t work well at all after a certain 



100 On Adding Machines 

clerk had been hired. But Reachup was a 
very careful man. Each evening, just as the 
sun went down, he counted the cash, found ex¬ 
actly how much he was short, and noted it in a 
book. At any time he could tell the shortage 
off-hand to the very cent. Only yesterday he 
remarked proudly to one of his competitors 
that he had in the last four months detected 
the absence of three hundred and thirty-eight 
dollars and forty-eight cents. 

Old Abner Wethershedd was a farmer who 
raised sheep. But as fast as he raised them 
some one else came along and “lifted” them. 
The process kept Abner busy, but he was a 
shrewd old farmer. He kept a strict up-to- 
date tally of all the missing sheep. Last week 
he remarked in his forceful bucolic way that 
he’d be “hogwallered ef he knew how he was 
a-goin’ to keep that flock on its feet.” He 
reckoned he’d “have to buy sheep to fill up 
them missin’ numbers.” 

“Stop!” you will exclaim. “Don’t go on. 
These are parables for the feeble-minded. The 
answer is too easy. Anybody can count. 
What Oliver and Clara and the Messrs. 
Reachup and Wethershedd ought to do is to 
stop counting and go after the mole and the 



*> 


K 


On Adding Machines 101 

cat and the thief and the wolf that cause the 
trouble, and get them out of the way.” 

You have hit it, .son. Absolutely the cor¬ 
rect answer. 

But when we seek to know ourselves, when 
we examine our faults with a view of, as we 
say, correcting ourselves, do we not follow a 
line of action very similar to theirs? We count 
the precise number of times we fall, and we 
keep on counting over and over again, rather 
proud of ourselves, too, that we are so accu¬ 
rate. But we never reduce the count, never 
get at the final root of the trouble. We tell 
lies so often and so often, but we balk at ad¬ 
mitting that we are uncandid, sneaky in our 
soul; we disobey, but will not find out that we 
are ungrateful; we are impure, but stop at 
saying that we are selfish, sensual, animal in 
our make-up; we fail in our duties of studying, 
but will not concede that we are lazy “stallers,” 
loafers; we go with evil companions, but resent 
the notion that we are cowards and easily led. 

There is the real fault, the big mistake under 
all the other mistakes. We do not find out 
why we have to keep on with all this intermina¬ 
ble counting. We never discover the great 
source of all this river of sins and mistakes. 


102 On Adding Machines 

We call in the doctor, and when he simply 
says, “Yes, it is all clear; this is my fifty-third 
case of typhoid,” we are fully satisfied with 
the treatment. We have the building tumbling 
about our heads time after time, but we go 
poking around in the ruins and think we are 
doing lovely if we count the bricks. 

Anybody can count bricks, or dead canary 
birds, or mistakes. The thing to do is to get 
under all this counting and see what it is that 
causes it; what is the radical, the characteristic 
blunder we are making deep down under all 
this adding-machine stuff. Why do we fail to 
dig to this spot? Because we lack the courage; 
we are afraid it will hurt. We scotch the 
snake; we don’t kill it. It curls up for a while, 
and presently it uncoils and bites us again. 
And we label it: Bite No. 73. 

If we ever wish to get over being mere “eat¬ 
ers and drinkers,” to turn sincerely to “seek the 
kingdom of God and His justice,” we shall be¬ 
gin right here to do it. “The kingdom of God 
is within you.” Inside of us is the place to be¬ 
gin, and so far inside that we strike at the tap¬ 
root of the trouble. Then we shall find that all 
the branches that shoot from it will shrivel up 
and die. 


FOLLOWING THE MULE 


D ID you ever see a boy in class having a 
merry giggle all to himself, brimful of 
joy over a good joke he has just played on one 
of his schoolmates, and right in the middle of 
his joy, just as he begins to feel that he has got 
safely by with the contraband stuff, having the 
teacher suddenly pounce on him and drop a 
shell on him in the form of a good stiff pen¬ 
ance? 

You remember the instantaneous and heavy 
gloom that swept over that patch of sunshine 
on Dick’s face, the ecstatic gurgle turned into 
a subterranean growl, and the triumphant 
whisper of victory keyed up to a long-drawn 
plaintive “Oh, what did I do?” 

In thirty seconds Dick’s bubbling joy has 
been transformed into a twenty-ton grouch! 

Did you ever see Bill playing ball—three of 
Bill’s men on bases, and the fourth man fol¬ 
lows with a clean home run? Oh, the world is 
made of ice-cream and cake! Life is one long 
dream of joy! A minute afterward the umpire 

103 


104 Following the Mule 

calls Bill out at first on a close decision. Ouch! 
What a horrible noise! 

Did you ever see our friend Harry at home? 
Time—night. Scene—a study table, books 
and papers scattered over it; Harry just set¬ 
tling down over his home work, his brain just 
getting into its stride. All at once a whistle 
outside, then an Indian yell, then the weird 
hoot of an owl—“Whoo-ee, whoo-ee!” Har¬ 
ry’s gang! And they want Harry. And our 
Harry? He lifts up his head like a bird listen¬ 
ing. Again the whistle, the yell, the ghostly 
“whoo-ee!” The call of the wild. The books 
swim away into oblivion. Our boy reaches for 
his hat and coat, and dashes for the exit. All 
currents reversed in three minutes. 

Did you ever see Bill? Or Harry? Or 
Dick? 

“Why, yes,” most of us, perhaps, will have 
to say, “I’ve seen Bill. In fact, I believe I am 
Bill. I know I’m one of those three some¬ 
times.” 

Indeed the description does fit us pretty 
closely, doesn’t it? All of us, some time or 
other, seem to do things as unevenly as our 
three boys here, and we wonder why we do it. 
It surely does make them look like geese, but 



Following the Mule 105 

it must make us look just as funny, if we stop 
to think. 

It is a good deal more than funny. This 
style of doing things is a big mistake, and if 
often repeated it becomes a dangerous defect 
of character. 

“How so?” you ask. 

Well, at first thought, you will laugh at Bill 
as you would at a toy that works by a spring. 
Touch the spring from without, the toy jumps 
up, waves its arms and shuffles its feet. It has 
no inner guidance. 

“This is the answer,” you will say. “Dick, 
Bill, Harry, have no guide, no principle to 
work on.” 

But you will be mistaken. These boys have 
chosen a guide. What guide? Instinct—ani¬ 
mal instinct, a most valuable gift in many 
ways, but one which needs very severe check¬ 
ing and tireless watching. 

What is this instinct? It is the tendency in 
us which urges us to seek the agreeable and to 
avoid the disagreeable; to shun the difficult 
and to pursue the easy; to follow pleasure and 
pleasurable things and to avoid pain. 

We can see at once that instinct has its good 
points; that it is, therefore, a genuine gift to 


106 


Following the Mule 

us from God, meant to be a help to us all 
through our lives. It is the instinct of hunger 
that makes us take food, thus keeping our 
body regularly supplied with what it needs. 
Instinct too it is that makes us pull our hand 
quickly out of the fire, jump aside from a 
speeding car, protect ourselves from too much 
cold or heat, avoid unhealthy spots, take rest 
as the body requires it. 

In itself, then, instinct is our friend, and a 
friend we could not get along without. And 
the great reason is because it acts so quickly. 
If we had to reason ourselves out of all the 
dangers we encounter every day, we should 
long ago have been killed. But instinct is an 
electric block-signal for us, only operating with 
incredibly greater speed than any electric sig¬ 
nal. And besides hurrying us out of danger, 
it guides us with the same motion into secure 
shelter. So that, in a sense, we may term in¬ 
stinct our life-saver. 

At the same time instinct can become our 
worst enemy. For two reasons: First, al¬ 
though it acts quickly, it acts blindly; and 
there is a part of man that must never act 
blindly. Second, it always acts directly for the 
body, and of itself does nothing for the soul. 


107 


Following the Mule 

See where the danger is and where the check is 
needed? If instinct were allowed to go as it 
pleased, it would dash blindly about, hunting 
up good things for the body, and push the soul 
into a corner from which it never could come 
out. So that the instinct of hunger would de¬ 
velop into a perpetual hunger; of thirst, into a 
perpetual thirst; of pleasure, into a perpetual 
desire for pleasant things, until life for 11 s 
would come to be one mad and constant craving 
for bodily satisfaction. 

We must keep a sharp eye on instinct, there¬ 
fore ; draw a boundary line for it and see that 
it never oversteps that line. And where shall 
we draw that line? Right at the edge of rea¬ 
son, and as soon as instinct starts to get across 
that edge, push it back. Remember, we are 
not mere animals. Animals act entirely by in¬ 
stinct, automatically. God depends upon us 
and gives us His grace precisely to enable us 
to regulate our instincts by our reason and our 
will power. And just as soon as we fail to do 
this a foolish or a sinful error is the result. 

This is where Dick made his mistake in the 
classroom. He had his little joke, and had a 
barrel of fun out of it. Not so awful a mat¬ 
ter, after all. A good joke, even though out 


108 Following the Mule 

of season, has its bright side. But untimely 
jokes call for timely punishment, and Dick 
knew it. Nevertheless he sends up a loud wail 
of agony. Why the agony? Not because the 
punishment was unfair. Dick’s reason told 
him that it was fair. But because Dick was 
hurt, and anything that hurts little Richard is 
absolutely naughty. Dick’s instinct wins over 
his reason. 

So with Bill. No one objects if Bill turns 
three handsprings when a man on his team 
sends the ball over the back fence with the 
bases full. That’s legitimate instinct. But 
when the umpire calls Bill out at first a mo¬ 
ment later, why give an imitation of a hungry 
Bengal tiger looking for raw meat ? Bill’s feel¬ 
ings are jarred, that’s all. And nobody should 
jar Willie. 

The same with Harry. It is lovely, no 
doubt, to have our gang so yearn for us that 
they have to moan and shriek outside the 
house till they win us to them once again. In¬ 
stinctively Harry likes that, and he isn’t all 
wrong, either, in liking it. But what about 
reason holding him to his duty at the books? 

“Reason!” says Harry, with his finger in his 
mouth. “I never heard of it.” 


109 


Following the Mule 

Watch any boy who travels along the road 
of mere feeling, instinct, and you will see a boy 
who is going to hurt himself terribly. One 
minute he wants to see something. See it he 
will, at any cost. Another minute he wants to 
hear something. Hear it he will, no matter 
what reason says against it. He must associ¬ 
ate with a certain boy, a certain crowd, no mat¬ 
ter how dangerous to him. He must play a 
certain game, and throw everything aside for 
that. Instinct dominates him, owns him, 
drives him along ahead of it. 

Finally, after a continuous surrender to the 
impulse of pleasure from without, he begins to 
surrender to the baser instincts from within, 
until his whole life is possessed with the single 
idea of pleasure. Is a thought tempting? He 
admits it. Is a desire alluring? He follows it. 
Is an action satisfying to the senses? He does 
it. He has only one rule of life: “Is it pleas¬ 
ant?—I’ll do it. Is it unpleasant?—I’ll not 
do it.” 

And then, when manhood comes and this 
boy has become set in, imbedded in, enslaved 
to, this sort of life, we find him defending his 
course. “Why did God give me the instinct,” 
he says, “if He did not wish me to use it?”— 


110 Following the Mule 

like the patient for whom the doctor had pre¬ 
scribed strychnine, marked “Poison/’ to aid 
the heart action. “Why did he give me this if 
I am not to use it?” says the patient, and swal¬ 
lows the whole box of tablets at once. Result 
—the heart stops altogether. Life goes out. 

It is the same with instinct. Rightly used, 
in small doses, well regulated, it helps the soul. 
Wrongly used, as the single principle of ac¬ 
tion, it is sure by little and little to kill the 
soul. 

Instinct, my dear boys, is not our guide. 
Never trust it. Instinct is only the pack-mule 
on our journey to heaven. It helps carry the 
baggage, but it isn’t the leader of the expedi¬ 
tion. It may start to run ahead whenever it 
spies a little grass, but we must drag it back 
and keep it from smashing our outfit. It may 
want to quit and lie down when a steep hill is 
to be climbed, but we must beat it and drive it 
on and up. 

Our reason, our heart, our soul, God’s grace 

i 

and God’s help, these are the leaders of our 
heavenly expedition. If we slight these, reject 
these, we dismiss the guides God has set us 
and choose in their stead the leadership of the 
mule. 


• • . ON BUSINESS METHODS 

T URNING over the advertising pages of a 
widely circulated weekly, I happened 
upon an advertisement about razor strops. It 
ran something like this: “You have been hav¬ 
ing trouble with your razor. Let us send you 
free, for ten days’ trial, this strop, and you’ll 
forget about your razor. Return the strop if 
you don’t like it—free. We couldn’t afford to 
make this offer but that w r e are supremely con¬ 
fident that 99 out of 100 will never send it 
back. Sign this coupon, and send it. Write 
now!” 

This advertisement struck me, not by reason 
of its originality, but as a representative sam¬ 
ple of modern business methods. Thousands 
of advertisements are put forth every week 
based on the principle of the above—the prin¬ 
ciple of putting the goods into the very hand 
of the prospective buyer, but at no immediate 
cost to him. All that is asked is that he actu¬ 
ally try the goods. He is gently hurried into 

such trial by the time limit of ten days or so 

in 




112 On Business Methods 

given him. And if the trial is made the sale 
is made ninety-nine times out of a hundred. 
This is a good business method, because it is 
satisfactory to the buyer. It approaches him 
honorably; does not try hypnotic tactics to 
force a sale. “We won’t say a word,” the dis¬ 
tributors promise. “Just try the goods. 
They’ll talk to you for us.” And with a good 
article only one out of a hundred will refuse 
to keep it. 

From razor strops to souls is not, we may 
think, an easy transition. It does seem rather 
a high leap, but let us take it on the run. Why 
not apply this strop idea to our souls? Why 
not use business methods in the only business 
worth while—the business of our salvation? 
“What doth it profit a man to gain the whole 
world and lose his own soul?” Note the busi¬ 
ness atmosphere in these striking words. Loss, 
gain, profit, are the basic ideas in all the work 
upon our soul. “If you wish to save your 
soul,” God says, “go into it as a business. Use 
business methods.” 

Does God Himself use business methods in 
His dealings with us? Yes, He does; honora¬ 
ble, fair, broad, generous business methods. 



On Business Methods 


113 


First of all He offers to send you, free for 
trial, His grace, His gifts. You need, as 
every one needs, some special help. You are 
in trouble, in grief; some dark cloud of sin 
hangs over you; some insistent temptation 
harasses you into despair; some furtive demon 
follows you about and fearfully catches at you. 
You are having trouble, and you would be free 
of it. Then use business methods. Let God 
send His grace to you. Return it if you will 
after you have tried it —really tried it. But, 
once you have tried it, you will not return it, 
for you will find those other beautiful words 
singing in your heart: “My yoke is sweet and 
My burden light.” 

This is all that God asks of us: to try His 
grace. “Taste and see how the Lord is sweet” 
and you will never after desire the fieshpots of 
Egypt. 

Deep down in your soul you know that this 
is so—that the Lord is sweet. Go back to the 
time of the days of your young innocence. 
Compare that bright and happy time with the 
dark, dull years of sin that followed, the heavy 
groping of mind, the stifling oppression of 
heart, the ominous glare of hell lighting up in 


114 


On Business Methods 


flashes the gloomy cavern of your soul, where 
evil thoughts move ceaselessly back and forth 
like demons in their native shades. And once 
upon a time fresh sunlight was over everything 
here, and God so near that you could reach out 
and touch Him with your hand. Oh, if it could 
be so again! 

It can be so again. “Though thy sins be red 
as scarlet they shall be white as snow.” Try 
the Lord again, and see how near He is. Taste 
and see how sweet. One step and we are in the 
presence of God once more. One word from 
us, the single word of acceptance of His grace, 
and all is well with us. Easy and simple and 
very businesslike it is, this shaking off trouble 
and saving our soul. 

And what do we say to this offer God makes 
us? What is our attitude toward Him? Are 
we beginning to say, “Yes, we will try, but not 
now”? Ah, that is not business. “Write 
now/' we are told by the advertiser. “Come 
now,” God says, “now is the acceptable time, 
the time of salvation.” But we prefer to stay 
down in the mine, suffocating to death, and 
will not “now” enter the cage that is lowered 
to raise us to the top. “We will, but not now” 


On Business Methods 


115 


means “We will, but we won’t.” God will 
have no further dealings with a mere pre¬ 
tender. 

“It is too much trouble.” Too much trouble 
to get out of trouble? Too much trouble to be 
free, to be masters in our own house? Too 
much trouble to be with God ? 

The real difficulty with us is—lack of nerve, 
lack of that genuine pluck and spirited candor 
that will bring us to a business understanding 
with God. When the question comes up in our 
conscience of dealing fairly and above board 
with God, we go into a species of stage-fright. 
We try to say yes and no in the same breath; 
we palter and haggle and shuffle around the 
truth; we say with our lips that we welcome 
God, but with our hearts that He is a hard 
master; we reach out our hand to take the offer 
God makes us, but at the same time reach back 
with our other hand so as not to miss anything 
the devil has to put into it. 

This is the kind of treatment God hates and 
will not endure. If we are to do business with 
God, it is with Him and nobody else. And 
with Him it is all or nothing. We cannot serve 
two masters; it must be either one or the other, 



116 


On Business Methods 


either God or the devil; and the boy who thinks 
he is sharp enough to have a little of one and 
a little of the other and get off safely with it is 
a mere trickster who arouses the anger of God 
and evokes the derisive contempt of the devil. 

Be a boy who does an honorable business 
with God. He gives Himself entirely to you. 
You, in turn, see that you give yourself en¬ 
tirely to Him. Make a fair exchange—or none. 
Give the grace of God a real trial, even if only 
a ten days’ trial. But don’t try to cheat Him 
in the deal. Be a boy who dares to be himself, 
who dares to let God lead him; not a crying 
child whose mother has to drag it along the 
sidewalk, a ridiculous and uninviting object. 
Dare to walk right up to the deadly and widen¬ 
ing chasm that separates you from happiness, 
and when you get there do not spend your 
time weakly looking down into the depths that 
make you dizzy. The leap you are to take is 
upward and forward. Then follow the climb¬ 
er’s law: Look upward and forward. Keep a 
cool head, a stout heart. Gather yourself for 
the spring—every bit of you, body and soul— 
boldly take the leap, and you will find yourself 
in the arms of God. 




ON SNAKE CHARMERS 


Who will pity an enchanter struck hy a ser¬ 
pent, or any that come near wild beasts? 

—Ecclesiasticus. 

H AVE we ever considered what a wonder¬ 
ful organ is the tongue of man? Often 
enough we think of the eye, and how the whole 
big world of light and color and motion is first 
condensed into that tiny spheroid and, by some 
unfathomable process, instantly expanded 
again and vitally translated into its original 
size. We think of the ear, how into its orifice 
crowd the twisted and intertangled and appar¬ 
ently hopelessly confused medley of sounds, 
musical and harsh, shrill and deep, to be sepa¬ 
rated one from the other in a flash, located, 
identified, pigeonholed. 

But on that hidden organ, the tongue, we 
seldom fasten a thought. As with the great 
invisible powers of nature, light, gravity, the 
growing energy in animals and plants, powers 
operating about us and within us so continu¬ 
ously and unobtrusively that we take them for 

117 


118 


On Snake Charmers 


granted and forget the fundamental marvel of 
them, so with the tongue—normally unseen, al¬ 
ways poised for action, responding always 
easily, unhesitatingly, dependably, without 
strain, without fatigue, without even the sug¬ 
gestion of any physical limitation to its action, 
it, with all its potentialities, becomes a thing of 
utter commonness to us, and, by reason of its 
very facility of use, we overlook it as an unim¬ 
portant asset among the gifts we possess. 

And yet, among all the material things that 
live and move and have their being, it is abso¬ 
lutely the most wonderful single thing. The 
eye conquers the wide field of vision, the ear 
weaves into patterns the knotted skein of 
sound; but the tongue stands at the gates of 
the infinite domain of thought, translates it 
into words and gives it forth palpitating with 
the finest shades of feeling, imagination, intel¬ 
ligence. Every movement it makes, carries 
with it happiness or sorrow, from the first 
happy babblings of the child to the last sad 
farewells spoken over the grave. Soul meets 
soul across the bridge of language, and the 
tongue fashions every girder. 

The Scriptures speak again and again of the 



On Snake Charmers 


119 


tongue, almost with a note of terror. “Life 
and death are in the power of the tongue,” 
they tell us; the tongue is “a little member,” 
but “a fire, a world of iniquity”; a poison more 
deadly than that of the basilisk and the asp; 
as the rudder guides the ship, so is the tongue 
the helm of the spirit; an uncontrollable being 
—“but the tongue no man can tame”; the one 
great obstacle to our salvation—“If any man 
offend not in word, the same is a perfect 
man.” 

So the tongue is the fiery focus where all the 
forces of the soul converge. Its action is the 
resultant of a thousand actions that rush to 
that spot to hurl themselves out upon the 
world. A thousand looks, a thousand feelings, 
a thousand thoughts, can pack themselves to¬ 
gether at that one point and leap forth with all 
their accumulated force in a single word. 

If Scripture is frightened at the contempla¬ 
tion of the havoc the tongue can cause, cer¬ 
tainly we should be frightened too. And very 
likely every boy, when he comes to think of it, 
will say to himself: “Yes, I ought to be care¬ 
ful about my talk, and I will be.” That is a 
good resolution, and I have not a doubt that 


120 


On Snake Charmers 


every one of us has often been forced into 
making it by some awful mistakes made with 
our tongues. From our own experience we 
will agree that the old saws, “Silence is 
golden/’ “Think before you talk,” “Walls 
have ears,” put the case with an honest clear¬ 
ness. 

Well, then, for the practical side of the work. 
How shall I take care ? How shall I, in actual 
life, manage this tongue of mine? 

The surest and at the same time the easiest 
way a boy can learn to talk right, is to listen 
right. Talking always begins with listening; 
and no boy has ever started on a destructive 
career of talking, unless he has first been an 
easy and curious listener. Out of the heart the 
mouth speaketh, and the reservoir of the heart 
is largely filled with what the boy listens to. 
Watch out for what is said to you and you will 
watch out for what you say to others. 

And if you really wish to watch out for what 
is said to you, make this your infallible rule: 
Don’t let everybody talk to you. Don’t be at 
the mercy of every random vagabond, to allow 
him to spear you like a fish or to truss you up 
like a target. Above all, apply this rule ab- 


On Snake Charmers 121 

solutely and without fail in the case of the im¬ 
pure talker. 

And in this matter of the impure talker un¬ 
derstand that he is not always discoverable at 
first sight. More often than not he is cleverly 
disguised. He is not necessarily a low-browed 
individual with a hole in his hat and his shoes 
untied. Very, very often he is well dressed, 
clever, witty, with an intelligence much above 
par, bright-mannered, an observer of exterior 
etiquette, has money to show, is good at games, 
approachable, popular. Yet within he is full 
of rottenness. He uses his gifts to corrupt 
others, particularly boys younger than himself. 
These he will allow within the charmed circle, 
patronize them, treat them with a kind of bluff 
equality that makes them swell up when they 
think they are at last keeping step with the 
neighborhood hero. 

And then he proceeds to victimize them with 
his talk. He knows all about things. Narrow¬ 
minded people, such as their elders, their par¬ 
ents, try to hide things from them. He’ll tell 
them everything. And by jest and story and 
innuendo and insinuation, with the play of 
humor over it all, he slowly poisons the young 


122 


On Snake Charmers 


minds that are feeding on the candied garbage, 
and causes every barrier of manly shame and 
boyhood modesty to crumble. And while the 
boys whom he is attacking imagine they are 
learning things, having a good time, he is dig¬ 
ging under the walls every minute. 

At first they are startled, shocked, disgusted. 
But they stay right with him, and gradually 
get used to the evil odor. They won’t be “sis¬ 
sies,” “mollies,” or “mamma’s boys.” They’ll 
be, as he says, broadminded, strictly up-to- 
date, wise boys, in touch with the world, par¬ 
ticularly the underworld. 

They do not suspect what is the actual fact, 
that their patron is only a poser; that he does 
not know it all; that he has only the half- 
knowledge which is more stupid than the dark¬ 
est ignorance. They do not realize that he has 
no idea whatever of the inner side of the case, 
of the hopeless destruction that all impurity 
brings upon soul and body. He deals in that 
worst form of lying, the half-truth. 

Any sensible person knows that this boy is a 
fool. But he is not the biggest fool in that 
crowd around him. And when we come down 
to hard facts, he is not the worst boy in the 


On Snake Charmers 


123 


crowd, either. He is talking, it is true, and 
talking rotten stuff. But what makes him 
talk? The answer is plain. It is the crowd 
there that makes him. He talks because he 
has somebody to listen to him. He is in the 
spotlight, but they put him there. If there 
were no listeners he would not say a word. 
But he sees his green, unfledged “gang” gath¬ 
ered hungrily about him, and he feeds the slimy 
stuff into their gaping little mouths; stuff 
which they swallow with difficulty at first per¬ 
haps, but which, with regular practice, they 
finally gulp down with facility. Warn them of 
their danger and they will tell you: 

“Oh, he can’t hurt me. I’m perfectly safe. 
Don’t worry about me. I just listen to hear 
what he has to say.” 

The old story! The enchanter walks up 
close to the serpent, entirely certain that the 
coiled object is under his control and that it 
will stop on signal. And the first thing he 
knows, the deadly fangs are plunged deep into 
him. The trainer steps into the wild beasts’ 
cage and the next second he finds himself being 
ground in their jaws. So the listener to the 
talk of the impure. He thinks he is an en- 


124 


On Snake Charmers 


chanter and can hold the talker back of the 
danger mark; a lion-tamer, who has but to 
wave his hand and the beast will crouch back¬ 
ward. And suddenly he finds the tightening 
coils of a degrading sin wound around him, and 
is bitten to death by the teeth of an evil habit. 

Then in the recklessness of despair he ceases 
to be a listener and becomes a talker, chooses 
out his own victims, and devastates every soul 
his tongue can reach. 

If, my dear boys, you would have the very 
best gift that life has for any of us, if you would 
be pure, clean, happy-hearted, clear of con¬ 
science, never listen for a minute to the evil 
talker. Shake him off; push him back; get rid 
of him. Sin, like misery, loves company. 
Freeze him by your absence. If there are no 
listeners there will be no talker. 

But if you encourage him, expect the worst. 
H is talk will soon pass into your talk, and you 
will have entered upon the way of ruin—ruin 
to yourself and to everybody who touches you. 
And do not then cry out: “He ruined me!” 
Rather say: “I ruined myself. Bad as he was, 
he would not have talked had I not listened. 
It was I who made him talk. It was I who 
brought this on myself.” 



IN THE TRENCHES 


W HEN the young recruit first says he’ll 
be a soldier, what is his notion of a 
soldier? It is a vision in which drift before his 
eyes the long parade, the spotless, natty uni¬ 
form, the gleaming guns, the fine, firm line 
marching in perfect step, wheeling, counter¬ 
marching; the band playing, flags fluttering, 
officers riding along the line—everything in 
time and tune; great crowds along the way; 
hurrahs and handkerchiefs. And then the de¬ 
parting train; the silent handclasp, with its 
pressure that holds a world of meaning; and 
the tears of farewell, the gasps of admiration, 
the heart-thrills, the air surcharged with noble 
sentiments all around. This, he thinks, is be¬ 
ing a soldier. He forgets that it is only a 
dream. 

He forgets the real soldier life. He has no 
vision of the long, weary marches; the eternal 
drill; the tired feet and tattered shoes; the 
camping on the hard, the wet ground; the chill 
and again the fever; the swamp lands and the 

125 



126 In the Trenches 

slime and slush; the climbing, wading, fording; 
the battle—its mad disorder, its blood, groans, 
thirst and hunger, nakedness and filth, rain, 
snow, fog, sleet. The hands that once play¬ 
fully patted the gun now freeze to the lock; 
the feet that stepped ahead so springily, now 
drag a trail through the dust; the voice that 
gayly hummed a battle song, now gasps out a 
welcome to death. This is doing what a real 
soldier must do to save his fellow men. And 
this is the only thing that counts. 

So it is with the young boy, or the young 
man, looking forward to life and making the 
choice of his field of battle. 

“What shall I be?” he asks himself. He 
generally decides that he is going to he some¬ 
thing—and then he has a dream. 

Being something is to him a beautiful pic¬ 
ture. He sees himself in his chosen field, a 
brilliant success, holding his place with quiet 
grace and dignity; people crowding to get a 
look at him, a word from his mouth, a smile 
from his lips, a wave from his hand. He is 
affable to all, dispenses good will beamingly all 
about him, utters broad, magnanimous senti¬ 
ments, and is cheered to the echo. Every one 



In the Trenches 


127 


bows down as to the Lord High Executioner 
and offers him the incense of deep homage. 
Money is handed to him, responsibility laid 
at his feet. He is the observed of all observers, 
the one bright star that makes the other stars 
in the constellation look like Japanese lan¬ 
terns. This is being somebody—somebody! 
This is greatness; this is achievement! 

He is drawn to forget—often in his young 
view of life he does forget—two words in Our 
Lord’s parable quoted above from St. Mat¬ 
thew: the word “servant,” and the word 
“done.” 

Servant! And he has dreamed of himself as 
the master! He hears the word and it has a 
disagreeable sound in his ears. Is he, then, a 
person upon whom commands are laid? Is 
that the highest position to which he can rise 
in the world—to be a mere servant, one who 
must obey and obey, and still obey? This is a 
discouraging and dreary outlook! 

And yet, my dear boys, it is our only out¬ 
look. All our lives we shall be servants. We 
are built to be servants, and we shall not escape 
it. Command after command shall be laid on 
us. In fact, they are laid on us now—general 






128 


In the Trenches 


commands, in the Ten Commandments; and, 
besides these, special commands, wherein is in¬ 
dicated the particular way in which each one 
of us is expected to carry out the general com¬ 
mands. For each one of us is destined for a 
special work that nobody in the world has ever 
done or ever can do. And for this work each 
one is equipped with a definite natural tem¬ 
perament and just such and such a measure of 
natural talents, to be used under a chosen set 
of circumstances. Added to these come certain 
supernatural gifts in the way of graces; and, 
for the work the Lord wants done, these super¬ 
natural gifts are the more important of the 
two. 

Don’t say to yourself: “I have a lot of nat¬ 
ural talent, and that’ll get me through.” It 
will not. It will take you a little way, with 
apparent success, but in the end you will find 
yourself marked down to zero. You remember 
Goliath, the big Philistine, who came out for 
forty successive days, terrifying the Jews with 
his challenges. And he looked the part, too. 
A huge giant, with a massive shield, a breast¬ 
plate, greaves, helmet, and a tremendous 
sweeping sword that made circles around him 


In the Trenches 


129 


as big as a mill pond. And yet David, with 
his little sling, and the smooth stone in it, and 
God’s aim back of it, made that giant crumple 
up like a paper bag. Goliath had got along 
famously for forty days, but on the forty-first 
he was nothing more than a useless heap of 
junk. 

We do need God’s help, His grace. And 
taking this and weaving it in with our natural 
talents, from the combination we develop the 
kind of energy we need, each according to his 
gifts. 

And what shall we use this energy for? Ah, 
that brings us to the second word our Lord 
emphasized, which the boy often forgets—the 
word “do.” 

Christ lays intense stress on doing. It is 
His great test of love. “Follow Me” He that 
keepeth My commandments, he it is that lov- 
eth Me.” “Go and teach all nations.” “Go” 
(telling of the Good Samaritan) “and do thou 
likewise.” “When thou art invited, go, sit 
down in the lowest place.” “When thou 
makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the 
lame, and the blind.” ‘Thy will be done.” 
“Master, what must I do to possess eternal 



130 


In the Trenches 


life?” “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, 
with thy whole heart, with thy whole soul, with 
thy whole mind, with thy whole strength; and 
thy neighbor as thyself. This do and thou 
shalt live.” And to the young man who asked 
Christ the way of life the answer came: “Sell 
all thou hast, and give to the poor, and come, 
follow Me” 

See the clear-cut, rapid, brief, uncompro¬ 
mising answers Christ gives to those who ask 
Him how they shall become a permanent suc¬ 
cess in life, how they shall be something? It is 
go, and follow, and do, and sell your goods, 
all your goods—and give the money away. 
Call the poor in to your feasts; put yourself 
out for the unfortunate, all the while loving 
God by keeping His commandments with your 
whole heart; and do this, not with pharisaic 
ostentation, with stage strides and spectacular 
attitudes, but sitting down in the lowest place. 
Then you will he something. “This do and 
thou shalt live ” 

And right there is the mistake we are in 
danger of making. We ask what we shall he, 
before asking what shall we do. We never 
shall be anything until we do something. 




Stop the Game! 

We desire that team and no other to appear before us* 

















































































































In the Trenches 


133 


“What, then, shall I do?” you ask. 

Well, we are servants, and servants of the 
Lord. The idea of servant implies the idea of 
work. For what? Surely, for gain. But for 
what gain? For station, money, reputation? 
No. “What doth it profit a man if he gain the 
whole world and lose his own soul?” 

Christ wants only souls, and if we work for 
Christ we work along that line only. No 
matter what our work seems to be on the sur¬ 
face, the last idea, the purpose back of every¬ 
thing else, must be the idea and the purpose of 
souls for Christ. 

Shall I go into business, then, and make a 
fortune? Yes, into your Father’s business, 
to make your brother’s fortune. 

Shall I enter the law and plead cases? Yes, 
your Master’s case. 

Shall I study medicine and heal bodies? 
Not so that you will forget to heal souls. 

No man is exempt from this ultimate, su¬ 
preme duty. Always the work is for souls. 
The servant is not above his master. 

And each of us has appointed for him, and 
awaiting him, some definite work among souls. 
Each man is called upon to aid in the salvation 


134 


In the Trenches 


of souls—souls perhaps as yet unborn, per¬ 
haps even now at the grave’s edge, but waiting 
for us only. Do not miss these souls. 

One obstacle, and only one, can stop us in 
this work—the obstacle of a short-sighted 
selfishness, the coldness of self-interest, the 
miserliness of soul, the calculating spirit that 
meanly asks itself, “How will I come out of 
this?” 

How did Christ come out of it? “Go thou 
and do in like manner.” 

And if there be those among us who are 
called to be close to Christ in this work, if 
there be those whom He desires for special 
service, to devote their life directly to the 
care of souls, let them hear that voice calling 
to them across the waters: “It is I. Be not 
afraid.” If there be those whose lives are so 
appointed—and among the boys whom I ad¬ 
dress I cannot but believe that God has special 
work in store for many, work that is not 
trafficking, nor any of the world’s professions, 
but the intimate service of Christ in His priest¬ 
hood—let no chill of the evil one’s deceit freeze 
that great appeal of grace. 




In the Trenches 135 

“I am not worthy,” the timid soul will pro¬ 
test. 

No man is worthy of the priesthood. But 
Christ will abundantly fill his needs. Let such 
a one think of the souls awaiting his words, 
his presence, his deeds. Let him not dare to 
refuse this service, to hide his talent in the 
ground, to turn away mournfully and leave 
his Master. But let him place his feet firmly 
upon that path, follow that light and that 
Master who calls upon him to “go and teach” 
His children and lead them to Him as an older 
brother leads the younger home. 


SEEING THE STAR 


And seeing the star, they rejoiced with ex¬ 
ceeding great joy. And entering into the house, 
they found the Child,, with Mary, His Mother. 

And falling down, they adored Him; and open¬ 
ing their treasures, they offered Him gifts — 
gold, frankincense and myrrh .— St. Matthew 
2 ; 10 - 11 . 

T HIS little passage from St. Matthew 
introduces us to three of the finest and 
most lovable characters in the whole life of Our 
Lord. Somehow or other, after reading the 
few Scripture lines about them, we feel that 
we know these princely men intimately, and we 
love them at the same time. And we love 
them, not because they happen to be of high 
rank, rich men, powerful men; but because of 
a royal trait of character they show through 
every word that describes them—the great trait 
of generosity. 

Every move they make reveals in them 
a constant high tide of generosity: the journey 
they made, first of all, to follow this star; the 
work of preparation, the leaving of home, the 
laying aside of their accustomed pomp to be- 

136 


137 


Seeing the Star 

come pilgrims in an unknown country; the 
risks they took along strange roads, then in¬ 
fested by robbers; the manly simplicity they 
showed in asking and taking directions from 
Herod; their dogged courage in pushing ahead, 
even when the star had disappeared from them. 

Then, when they had found the spot, observe 
their perfect manners, their ability to make 
allowances for others, to understand others in 
a difficult situation, the entire absence of snob¬ 
bery in their make-up. For, after all their 
trouble, they were rewarded at the end with 
what was apparently nothing more than a 
hole in the ground—an old cattle shelter in the 
side of a hill. But we don’t find them a bit 
ruffled at the setback, indignantly standing on 
ceremony, peevish because no one came out 
with pomp and flourish to meet the great 
princes. They did not stand haughtily back 
and say, “This cannot be the place!” No. 
Although they knew very well the etiquette of 
reception, here they wisely judged that for¬ 
malities were not the thing. And so, as the 
Scripture tells us simply, “They entered into 
the house,” taking for granted that an explana¬ 
tion would reveal itself at the proper moment. 


138 


Seeing the Star 

And now their faith shines out. They had 
come to find a great King, One upon whom 
the stars attended, and they come upon a little 
shivering baby, in an unlighted cave. Adore 
this child? Impossible! 

Yet that was exactly what they did, these 
kings. More than that, without any delay 
at all, right in that dingy place, they prostrated 
themselves before Him. “And falling down, 
they adored Him.” 

And then they offered the little King their 
gifts. They had thought of this before they 
started, and had brought along their treasures 
of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They had 
already given their time, surrendered their 
comfort, imperilled their safety; they had sur¬ 
rendered their titles to a child, and had for¬ 
gone all ceremony in their honor. They had 
given the child their heart and life; and finally, 
not as a bribe to win His affection, but as a 
token of remembrance, they gave Him earthly 
gifts, their treasures. 

Note that word “treasures.” Not some¬ 
thing they had left over and did not know what 
to do with, but something choice, the very best 
things they possessed. 


139 


Seeing the Star 

And these were the Wise Men; men who 
gave, and gave aggressively; who would not 
let that Child escape from them until they 
gave Him everything they could give. Had 
He asked their kingdoms, He must have had 
them. 

No wonder we love these Magi. They 
couldn’t stop giving things to God. 

It seems to me, my dear boys, that the 
thought of the Magi is a particularly useful 
thought for us at the Christmas time. We 
hear the Christmas time called, and we know 
it is, a time of peace and good will. But if we 
are not careful we shall begin to look at only 
one side of this peace—namely, our own side. 
We may easily forget to imitate the Magi, 
whom we admire, and may fail to rise up and 
go to Christ at any cost. We incline to act as 
if we had nothing to do, but others have all 
the duty of securing our peace and of showing 
us their good will. We think it a season of 
peace because we are not disturbed, because 
others are waiting on us, making much of us, 
providing unusually good things for us. And 
we deem it a season of good will because we 
graciously allow other people to be kind to 



140 


Seeing the Star 

us and to give us things. We, of course, have 
a very good will—when it comes to taking 
things, getting things for nothing. But as soon 
as disturbance comes, or any trouble or annoy¬ 
ance to ourselves, then the season of peace is 
over. As soon as people seem to forget us, 
to stop giving us things, or do not give enough, 
or not the things we had set our heart on hav¬ 
ing, then good will goes, too. We have none 
at all for others. 

In short, do we not perhaps find ourselves 
softly whispering to ourselves at this time, 
“What am I going to get for Christmas?” and 
not thinking in the least, “What am I going to 
give for Christmas?” We set ourselves down 
in a tiny circle, make ourselves the center of 
it, and expect people to walk up and hand 
things to us or leave them within easy reach. 
As for getting out of our little circle and 
giving things to others—why, we never think 
of it. 

We strike the professional beggar’s attitude 
—look plaintive, more than half consciously 
assume a helpless, dependent pose, put on one 
of those deserving-of-immediate-help faces, 
create a pensive, lonely atmosphere about us. 


141 


Seeing the Star 

together with a forlorn-cripple manner that 
marks us out as one who is very good, but un¬ 
fortunate—oh, so unfortunate! If we don’t 
get what we had planned on, our comments 
on the depths of stinginess to which others can 
descend would make the most acid satirist seem 
mild as milk. 

If, however, we do get what we want, it is 
what we deserve. And after we render effu¬ 
sive, but strictly ‘‘professional,” thanks, we go 
away and hug our gift, forgetting all about the 
donor and everybody else except ourselves. At 
such times there is not much of the Magi in 
us. 

“But what can I give? I am not like the 
Magi. I have nothing to give.” 

Can it be true that any human being has 
nothing to give? A being with a soul made 
for God, that God died for, that is great 
enough to be set above everything on earth; 
a being with understanding and the wondrous 
faculties of speech, sight, hearing, the power 
of loving and serving others—and it has noth¬ 
ing to give? Is it possible that one upon whom 
has been lavished life, and minutest care, and 
long training, and love and toil, and anxieties 



142 Seeing the Star 

and fears and endless watchfulness, has, after 
all this, nothing to give? 

True, we may have no worldly possessions. 
But do these things really count when there 
is question of giving? The Magi, indeed, gave 
treasure, because it was one of the things they 
had. But they gave themselves first, and the 
treasure only as a token of their faith, with all 
that goes with true faith—love and toil and 
adoration. Christ did not need the treasure, 
but He did wish to have first place in their 
hearts and lives. And they gave Him that 
though it cost them trouble. And we have 
things to give no less than they. 

What have we? We have love to give, and 
faith, and surrender to God, the power to do 
things for God and our neighbor even when it 
costs us trouble. And from this treasure we 
are rich enough to give to every one. 

At home, with father, mother, sisters, 
brothers: What about the kind word, the help¬ 
ful deed, the generous response to little wishes? 
Do we take this trouble for them? 

Among our friends: What is our record in 
forbearance, amiability, cooperation with them? 
Do we think of them and their feelings first, 


Seeing the Star 143 

and of ourselves a shade later? It is trouble, 
but it is the finest kind of giving. 

Among people in general: Is there any 
work we can do to help others, no matter 
whom? Do we ever consider the poor, the 
outcast, the friendless, even at the cost at times 
of cutting into our cash supply? Besides this, 
there is varied work which we can do with our 
Sodality, such as teaching the catechism, visit¬ 
ing the sick, steadying a chum. 

And with God: Is there anything we are 
keeping back from God and that He ought to 
have? Is there any passion in our lives, any 
false friendship, any occasion of sin, any un¬ 
lawful pleasure, any “false treasure” in 
thoughts, words, actions, that we ought to give 
up? Give it up—now—for all time—never to 
wish it back. 

This is the secret of life—to give, give, give; 
lavishly, without stint, of your very best, and 
always. And this not merely at the Christmas 
time, not merely when sentiment rules or the 
passing feeling of piety, or when the enthu¬ 
siasm of being helpful is on one; but under 
every difficulty and through every reverse, 
from youth to old age, give yourself every day 






144 


Seeing the Star 

and hour and minute to every human being you 
can reach, and through these to God, who from 
birth to death gave Himself for us. 

Thus, living steadily, courageously, without 
fear, but with a firm trust that He who sees 
our hearts shall always be with us to strengthen 
us, we shall go forward day by day, through a 
useful youth, a noble manhood, a fruitful life, 
until, after many toils and dangers, we shall 
come to the close of the journey and shall draw 
near the home that waits us all. Then, at the 
end, shall we see the star, and we shall rejoice 
with exceeding great joy. And entering into 
God’s house, we shall find the Child, with 
Mary, His Mother. 


WITH THE OTHERS 


T HE single incident that Scripture tells 
us of Thomas the Apostle contains a 
valuable lesson. It is the one jarring incident 
related of that time of holy joy between Our 
Lord’s resurrection and His ascension. And 
though it closes happily, the shock of surprise 
it gives us makes it stand out prominently 
among the happenings of those forty days. 

We remember the facts: Jesus appeared 
to the disciples gathered together, and Thomas 
was absent. Upon his return he stubbornly 
refused to believe the word of the other disci¬ 
ples that the Lord had appeared, and they 
could do nothing with him until Jesus came 
again when Thomas was with them. Only then 
did he yield. 

The surprising thing in all this is that 
Thomas, a chosen apostle, who had gone 
through so much with them, and who had 
always found them truth-tellers, should have 
doubted their combined word with such per- 

145 


146 


With the Others 


sistent obstinacy. He must have known of the 
promise of the Resurrection, of the Lord’s ap¬ 
pearance to Mary Magdalen, of the supper 
with the disciples at Emmaus. And this final 
testimony of the entire body ought to have 
been the last straw to his attitude of doubt. 
Yet it took a special visit of Christ to win him 
over. 

What is the key to this unusual state of 
mind? We have it from St. John, who tells us 
the incident. Jesus appeared, and “Thomas 
was not with them.” Later Jesus appeared, 
and John significantly says, “Thomas was with 
them.” It would seem that the Lord had made 
it a condition that Thomas must be with the 
other disciples if he was to see his Master. 
Thomas was not with them and everything 
went badly. Thomas w^as with them and all 
was well. The real source of all his trouble, 
therefore, was that he was not with the 
others. 

And here we have the intimate lesson we 
are to learn from this whole matter of the 
doubting of Thomas. And the principle of our 
lesson is this: That when God wishes certain 
groups to live together, He gives His graces 



And Mary will understand us. 


(Page 192) 





















































With the Others 


149 


to individuals in the group just in proportion 
as they identify themselves with that group, 
stay with it closely and keep its spirit. 

Applying this lesson to ourselves, my dear 
boys, let us ask: Are we anything like 
Thomas? First of all, has God grouped us 
together? Yes. Young as we are, each one 
of us belongs to some group: to a certain class 
in school, to some Sodality, to our own family 
—father, mother, brothers and sisters. 

And the very special group we belong to 
is our family, a group with special work and 
special graces precisely for that work and no 
other. This is the group to which Christ Him¬ 
self belonged for thirty of the thirty-three 
years He lived. And this shows us its impor¬ 
tance in His eyes. Here, therefore, are to be 
found our special graces. And the graces we 
are to get in our family will depend on our 
attachment to it, our devotion to it, our strict 
membership in it. 

Let us ask ourselves, each one: “Am I 
really a member of my family?” 

“Yes, surely,” I hear somebody answer. “I 
eat there and sleep there. And there’s where 
I go when I have nowhere else to go.” 


150 


With the Others 


Ah—nowhere else to go! That brings us 
to the very point. Is our home for us like 
a coaling station for tramp steamers? Or a 
lunch counter on a railway trip, where we 
dash in for a hurried mouthful of food and dash 
out again and away? Ora mere place to sleep 
in, like a convenient haystack for a knight of 
the road ? Do we seek out our home only when 
we are tired of everything else, looking on it 
as a kind of Hobson’s choice, and going in 
with a feeling that it’s here or nowhere, with an 
air about us that says plainer than words, “I’m 
forced to try this, because I can’t think of any 
place else to go?” 

And even while we are there, are we merely 
perched there like a bird on a branch, popping 
its head about right and left, looking for an¬ 
other branch to light upon? Are our heart, 
our thoughts, our imagination far away from 
family and home and all the love that surrounds 
us—off with our “crowd,” perhaps, or our next 
game—so that it is plain to father and mother 
that their son is not interested in them at all 
and is quietly snubbing them? 

Do not imagine that these things do not go 
to the heart of your father and mother. If 


With the Others 


151 


they never say a word about it to you it is 
because they are ashamed to speak aloud the 
heavy thought that is in them—that their own 
son has forgotten them. 

And the “crowd” we are thinking of in pref¬ 
erence to our father and mother, is it one of 
the type so frequent nowadays, where the vile 
story, and the word of double meaning, and the 
dirty joke, and the impure allusion are its pass¬ 
word and its steady entertainment? And after 
we have dipped our minds and hearts and souls 
into the slime that oozes from the decaying 
imaginations that we have chosen to feed upon, 
do we then return to our homes, dripping with 
sodden degeneracy, and slink to our beds like 
an animal creeping into its kennel? 

“But,” you protest, “shall I have no fun, 
no games, no noise and action? Do you want 
me to be a mollycoddle? To hang around my 
father? He doesn’t care for that. To be tied 
to my mother’s apron strings ? The very worst 
thing for a boy.” 

I answer: Have plenty of fun, the very best 
games going, and all of them, as much noise 
and action as you like; have friends too, and 
keep them; and if to be a mollycoddle means 


152 


With the Others 


to be unboyish, soft, lackadaisical, by all means 
don’t be a mollycoddle. 

But there is another part of life that must 
be attended to. You are not asked to “hang 
around” your father, but you must meet him 
like a manly boy, you must take an interest in 
his affairs. You must be his chum, if you pos¬ 
sibly can. And if you find that you cannot 
come that close, come as close to him as you 
can. 

You are not to be tied to your mother’s apron 
strings. But I do say, be tied to her heart 
strings, so that there is not a wish of hers that 
you will not know and sympathize with and 
obey. Happy is the boy who does these things. 
His life through manhood, though perhaps 
commonplace in its visible surroundings, 
though with more than its share of disappoint¬ 
ments and reverses and sorrows, will yet be 
filled and consoled with the invisible glory of 
the love that rose with him at the dawn of life 
and shall light his pathway down to its golden 
close, if he has not, in the rash petulance of 
youth, cast it away. 

And after life has closed, after the long 
road is traveled and the last downward slope 


With the Others 


153 


is trod, it shall not end in darkness, but in 
a new, soul-filling access of light. After the 
vision, the reality. After home comes heaven. 
You remember the poet’s song of the skylark 
singing on high and then settling into the 
nest: 

Type of the wise who soar but never roam. 

True to the kindred points of heaven and home. 

The instinct for home means the instinct for 
heaven. Kindred points! Closeness to home 
means closeness to God, to His grace, to the 
great reward He has allotted us. And in pro¬ 
portion as we detach ourselves from our family, 
where God has put us, we cut ourselves off 
from the good things He holds for us. Are we 
straying from home in our hearts, our thoughts, 
affections, ideals? Do we need the warning of 
Thomas? If we need it, and heed it, all will be 
well. If we are not faithless, but believing, we 
shall find ourselves, at the end, in the company 
and the care of those to whom God has en¬ 
trusted us, and we shall not be absent in the 
hour when Christ shall appear and shall speak 
the words that mean so much to all of us, 
“Peace be with you.” 


A TOUCH OF THE WHIP 


O NE of the striking facts of life from 
which it is impossible to escape is the 
attention which the body receives. Nature 
herself speaks the first word in its favor. For 
the first seven years of the life of a man almost 
all the care given him is bestowed on his body. 
Two other beings are chosen out to attend 
to it—the parents. And while one of these goes 
out and works to procure all the child needs, 
the other remains at home in constant attend¬ 
ance upon the little one, and that attend¬ 
ance entirely upon the body. Selected food, 
special clothing, the regulation of heat and 
light, measured hours for eating, drinking—the 
whole house, in fact, is regulated according to 
the requirements of the child. 

Outside the home it is the same. Look about 
as you move through the city. What do you 
observe on the billboards, the street-car signs, 
the newspaper advertisements, theater pro¬ 
grams, electric displays ? All about the kind of 
wine or water or coffee to drink; the bread or 
vegetables or fruits to eat; clothing, medicine, 

154 



155 


A Touch of the Whip 

automobiles;—to cover the body, or to heal and 
strengthen it, or to carry it around. Certainly, 
nature and all the customs of men are for the 
body. 

And yet St. Paul comes boldly in and tells 
us that we must chastise our body; tells us 
that if we would be certain of ourselves, if 
we would win the fight before us, we must beat 
that body into subjection. “I fight,” he tells 
us, “not as one beating the air. I chastise my 
body and bring it into subjection.” 

What kind of advice is this? After spend¬ 
ing years of anxious care and thousands of 
dollars of money in building up and elaborat¬ 
ing that delicate and complicated and pre¬ 
cariously fragile structure, to turn and attack 
it ? After all the labor to keep suffering away 
from it, to cause it pain ourselves? After 
warding off all blows from without, to buffet 
it about with our own hands? Such advice is 
foolish on the face of it. Does a man build and 
furnish his house and then disorder and wreck 
it? Or does he plant and water his trees and 
then go about with a hatchet chopping at them ? 

The case seems strong against St. Paul. 
But let us consider it a little further. Sup- 


156 


A Touch of the Whip 

pose a man does build a fine house and furnish 
it handsomely. He is proud of it because it has 
cost him much time and ingenious planning. 
But suppose that the house begins to act 
queerly: that the windows begin to twist out 
of shape, the doors to sag and narrow, the 
walls to gape, the chimneys to choke, the furni¬ 
ture to move around and pile itself where it 
pleases. Or again, suppose he finds his trees 
with their branches tangling about one another, 
or shooting off at ugly angles, or growing 
downward instead of out and up. Then what 
does he do? 

In the first case, you will very soon see him 
with ax and saw and hammer and nails and 
props, going at that house and doing it savage 
violence. And with his orchard, you will see 
him with pruning knife and huge clippers, 
cutting those trees and making them grow as 
he wishes them to grow. 

It is exactly the same with the body. The 
body is indeed a great factor in our lives. In 
itself it is a beautiful, a noble piece of handi¬ 
work, a miracle of design and wondrous adap¬ 
tability, admired beyond words by every one 
who studies its structure. In its operation it 


157 


A Touch of the Whip 

is no less wonderful—the purveyor, the mes¬ 
senger, the forager for the soul, sweeping the 
wide circle of earth and heaven to gather the 
soul’s material for thought. It is valued highly 
by the Church as the “temple of the Holy 
Ghost,” and God Himself has set His seal 
upon its importance by making it the subject 
of five of His ten commandments. 

Nevertheless—and here we come back to 
St. Paul—the body is only a single factor in 
the welfare of a man. There is another, the 
important factor—man’s soul. Great as the 
body is, it is but the servant of the soul. And 
the danger is that if this servant be allowed 
to go unchecked it will do what all pampered 
servants do. It will become arrogant, insist 
on being the master, drag the soul down to the 
position of an inferior, and subvert the whole 
law of life by substituting for the soul’s 
standard of good and evil the body’s standard 
of pleasure and pain. 

Exactly here is where the chastising has its 
place. The body is great, is wonderful, is im¬ 
portant, is whatever you please to say in praise 
of its admirable mechanism. But the fact re¬ 
mains that it is the body—the tool, the subject, 





158 A Touch of the Whip 

the servant of the soul. It has tremendous 
powers, passions, instincts, and it makes violent 
efforts to have them recognized all the time. 
Insistently it cries out for satisfaction or com¬ 
fort, for luxury, pleasure. It is a spoiled child 
that must be whipped into obedience. It is a 
greedy, ungrateful, stubborn, domineering 
child that will never know its place until it is 
forcibly put into it, never cease insulting us 
until we punish it. 

“I chastise my body and bring it into sub¬ 
jection . 5 ’ Note how St. Paul distinguishes 
between the “I” and the “body.” He con¬ 
siders the body, when there is question of 
chastising it, as a thing apart and disunited 
from his soul. And so it is. Whenever the 
body does need chastisement it is simply be¬ 
cause there is an attempt on its part to break 
away from the soul and her authority and to 
drag the soul after it. Then the body must be 
brought into subjection, just as a dangerous 
criminal is put under lock and key. The soul 
has to be first always, but to hold her place 
she must often do battle for her position. 

If this is not done, then our real troubles 
begin, the troubles of sin. It is the body with 


A Touch of the Whip 159 

its senses that is the occasion of all our torture 
of soul, ever since that first day when Eve 
listened to the serpent and looked upon the 
tree and tasted the fruit thereof. 

The choice we have to make at last is be¬ 
tween the soul’s pain and the body’s. Either 
we check the body, hold it in leash firmly, with 
all its peevish and stubborn passions and all 
its complaints that it is being hardly treated, or 
we measure out to ourselves the deadliest pains 
of soul, disgusted with ourselves, in despair of 
God’s friendship, sick of the present, fearful of 
the future, helplessly palsied and dejected. 
How many a man, how many a boy, has 
groaned to himself, 4 ‘Oh, if I could get my soul 
out of this slavery! If I could only conquer 
this body of mine! If I could only be free!” 
When a boy says “if” in a case like this, you see 
where he has been driven by his body. His 
soul is in subjection, with the body laying on 
the lash. 

Let us make up our mind to one thing in 
this world if we never make it up to another: 
teach the body its place. Keep it where it 
ought to be. And if it attempts to refuse, do 
what St. Paul did—beat it into subjection. 



160 


A Touch of the Whip 

“If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off. 
... If thy right eye offend thee, pluck 
it out,” are the words of Christ. That is, give 
up anything that belongs to the body and its 
senses, no matter how necessary it seems for 
the body, rather than have your soul in slavery. 
And if it comes to the cutting off of a hand 
or to the plucking out of an eye, let it come 
to that. 

And begin to do this one thing now, while 
you are young. Don’t beat the air wdth wordy 
resolutions of great future conquests. Now is 
the time. There are duties disagreeable to the 
body, all around us, coming steadily up before 
us every day. Attend to them—studies in 
class and out; home duties to father and 
mother; directly spiritual duties, frequent con¬ 
fession, communion, prayer which is not a dull 
formula but an alert communication with God; 
the habit of doing a thing because it is right, 
and not because we like it. These things 
cleanly done right from the start are like the 
flicks of a whip on a race horse. They keep 
the body from wavering out of the true path, 
and at the same time give it impetus to cover 
with steady speed the long road ahead. 


SINKING THE WOODEN ONES 


Y OU have read of the ironclad Merrimac 
in the Civil War. When first she 

chugged her way out into Hampton Roads 
everybody laughed. She looked like the ugly 
duckling—an old tin gabled roof floating on 
a raft. And the veteran sailors in the big 
wooden vessels manned their guns and got 
ready for a few good shots by way of target 
practice. The only thing that worried them 
was that after a shot or two the fun would 
be ended. 

From the nearest vessel a gunner trained 
his gun and fired. The ball hit the Merri¬ 
mac, and hit her hard; but she only shook her¬ 
self like a horse shaking off a fly, and the huge 
missile bounded off her and fell into the water. 
Two guns got into action, ten guns, every 
gun in the harbor, and every one found the 
target. But the cannon balls rattled harm¬ 
lessly, like so many peas, off her armor. It 
was merely rain on the roof for the Merrimac. 

And when it was all over, large quantities of 

161 


162 Sinking the Wooden Ones 

recently splintered wood, a few masts sticking 
up through the water, and a wide unruffled 
surface of harbor were all that could be seen— 
and the little Merrimac, ugly as ever, and with¬ 
out the least self-consciousness,chugging home¬ 
ward. She had cleared out the old wooden 
vessels, not only for that day, but for all 
time. She had revolutionized sea fighting! 

If we could imagine the sturdy Merrimac 
thinking about herself on this trip, we could 
imagine her giving herself high words of praise, 
because she was doing well, doing just what 
she intended to do, what was expected of her, 
and what she expected of herself. She was 
throwing off attacks from right and left and at 
the same time driving off the old washtubs of 
vessels that had tried to sink her. She had 
every reason to praise herself. 

Turning this incident upon our own expe¬ 
riences, we often think, perhaps we are often 
told, that we must not praise ourselves. But 
God expects us to praise ourselves, and stren¬ 
uously, even as St. Paul praised himself, if 
we can. And if we have no praise for our¬ 
selves at all, we may be sure the Lord has 
none for us, either. 


163 


Sinking the Wooden Ones 

The only trouble in the whole matter is that 
we constantly tend to praise ourselves for 
things that we shouldn’t praise ourselves for 
at all. We are proud of our natural talents, 
our brains; proud of our looks, of our speed 
of foot, of our beautifully rounded muscles. 
We think we are all right if we wear the 
latest cut of clothes, if our necktie is becoming 
to our complexion, if our watch charm hangs 
elegantly. And we have seen boys looking ex¬ 
tremely perk after a simple haircut. 

These are nothing to be proud of, you will 
tell me. Right! They are not. What, then, 
can we be proud of? There is only one thing 
we have any license to praise ourselves for, 
and that is our power of will. True, this is 
a gift, and it needs grace to carry it along 
safely. But it is a gift with this wonderful 
quality, that it can go by itself, direct itself, 
propel itself. It is the only thing we have, 
the only thing in the world, that can do this 
remarkable work of accepting or rejecting as 
it pleases. No other part of us can do that. 
No part of the man moves until the will gives 
the word, and the will can give any word it 
chooses. 


164 Sinking the Wooden Ones 

The will, therefore, is the home of liberty, 
but at the same time the home of our respon¬ 
sibility. It is the exact spot where we are 
“ourselves.” And so it is the only part of us 
that we can blame or praise as having of our 
own selves done thus or thus. And God ex¬ 
pects us always to be able to praise ourselves 
for our use of the will, in those words that are 
the highest praise—“I did right.” 

To do right, that is, to accept or reject 
steadily according to God’s law, the will must 
be in good condition. The Merrimac was so 
built that it would admit light and air, but 
reject bullets. And that is the test of the will. 
Does it admit what is good and cast off what is 
evil? Does it, like the Merrimac, admit the 
good easily and shake off the evil instan¬ 
taneously? Its condition will be graded ac¬ 
cording to the speed and the efficiency of its 
action on these lines, its alertness, its power of 
giving evil a rapid rebound. And it ought to 
be solidly strong at every point, for, if it is 
not, one shell out of the thousands will tear 
through. 

Now, to test our will at a few points and 
to find out how it works. How about our 



165 


Sinking the Wooden Ones 

thoughts, for example? Here come a million 
thoughts a day, some bad, some good, some 
doubtful, some from without, some from our 
lower selves, but all turning a steady fire, and 
at times a terrific fire, upon our will. How 
does my will act here ? Hoes it admit the light 
and the air, the good thoughts? And is it like 
an armored ironclad against the shells and the 
bullets, the evil thoughts? Or have I a will 
like a pie set carelessly out, which the dog 
simply walks through?—or like an old cheese 
nibbled full of holes by the rats? 

And our companions? Have we the kind of 
will that tolerates any kind of companion, 
any kind of talk, suggestion, innuendo? Some¬ 
times outside of a town we see a swamp, a 
mushy, bubbly quagmire, into which is flung 
all the refuse and garbage and dead cats—ugh! 
—that the town doesn’t know what to do with; 
an insufferable spot into which everything de¬ 
cayed and odoriferous is thrown. Am I a boy 
with a bubbly swamp for a will? Do I allow 
any other boy who comes along to fling vile 
thoughts, impure words, putrid stories into my 
soul? Do I perhaps even laugh at the process 
in a sickly way, in the hope that the narrator 




166 Sinking the Wooden Ones 

will think me a good fellow, right up to date? 

My dear boys, be sure of this: If any boy 
has rotten thoughts he wishes to pass along 
and he chooses you to pass them to, believe one 
thing only—his opinion of you is that you have 
a soul fit for sewage. When we make a 
present to a person we adapt the gift to the 
person. We give a rattle to the baby, a base¬ 
ball glove to the boy, a good book to a reader, 
flowers to the sick. And when your so-called 
friend presents you with a line of filthy talk 
he has sized you up beforehand and decided on 
what he thinks fits you. 

Be ironclad on these two tests—the thoughts 
we admit, the companions we become familiar 
with. Anything evil from either of these 
sources shake off instantly with all the deter¬ 
mination that is in us. 

“But I shall be laughed at for a goody-goody 
and a prude.” 

No such thing. You are not called upon to 
preach a sermon to the offender. You needn’t 
look large-eyed, nor sweet, nor pious, nor 
shocked, nor even the least bit embarrassed. In 
fact, it is much better that you shouldn’t. But 
you have somewhere about you a far-away look, 


1G7 


Sinking the Wooden Ones 

haven’t you? Or a frosty countenance, or an 
absent-minded answer? These are a few beau¬ 
tiful “straightarms” for the low fellow that 
tries to tackle you. You can manufacture your 
own defense according to circumstances, and it 
will generally be a good one. 

“But it is difficult, this being always on the 
defensive, and uninteresting, too!” 

You are not on the defense at all, once you 
start to act. Don’t lose sight of the Merrimac; 
her defense was complete before she started 
out at all. And the rest was a fine offense. 
They laughed at her at the start, but that was 
the last laugh they ever had. She simply kept 
on coming, and when she was through with her 
“defense” there wasn’t anything left. 

And so with you. You will find that all 
these filthy talkers are really “wooden ones” 
out for some cheap applause. A rapid little 
bunt from the prow of a plucky ironclad goes 
right into these worm-eaten scows easily, and 
sinks them. It’s fun sinking mud-scows. And 
everybody near by is relieved. Besides, one 
has then more room to sail around in. And 
fresh air and water, too. 

One idea more: In the Merrimac battle only 


168 Sinking the Wooden Ones 

one man was injured, a lieutenant, I think, 
who had his eyes destroyed while peer¬ 
ing through one of the slits in the iron tower. 

" Doubtless he had good reasons for being where 
he was, and his injury did not affect the final 
outcome of the fight. Enough of the crew 
were left to man the ship. But in our battle 
with evil we must beware of looking for trou¬ 
ble. Because there is only one man aboard in 
our ship, and if anything serious happens to 
him the ship founders. 

Let God do the watching for us and through 
His grace give us the orders when and where 
to fire. Then we can praise God for His help, 
and praise ourselves for having manfully ac¬ 
cepted it. 


ON PLANTING REGRETS 


N OT long ago a university journal sent out 
a request to the alumni of the institution, 
asking each student to write and say briefly 
what was the principal regret of his college 
days. Most of the answers were highly in¬ 
teresting, but one letter in particular seemed to 
me to hit squarely on the head the nail at which 
all were, more or less consciously, aiming. The 
writer of this letter said that the chief thing 
he had to regret since he had left school was 
that while in school he had had no adviser in 
his moral life. Plenty of teachers were at 
hand, many of them able and effective, but 
no moral guide. And to this one defect he 
traced all the unhappinesses of his later life. 
Had he been seized, he said, and faced cor¬ 
rectly toward life at that time, he would have 
been spared many mistakes and falls, many 
years of darkness and pain of soul. 

Most of the other writers made much the 
same complaint, under various forms of speech. 
They had no adviser at the start to teach them 

169 


170 On Planting Regrets 

how to steer, and they were turned out upon 
the world without chart or compass. 

It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that a 
correct “facing” of life in our study years 
will do away with all the moral troubles of 
after days. But any one who has lived through 
the world’s stress will tell you, from his own 
experience, that he had strong leanings after¬ 
ward toward what he began to do in his school 
days. If he went wrong in youth, his terrible 
tendency was to stay wrong, to get worse. If 
he went right, it took an unusual force to budge 
him in later years. 

It is the old saying borne out, that the boy 
is father to the man. 

Now, we certainly do not wish to belong 
to that class of boys who begin in their youth 
to plant regrets for their older years. We 
want to start right. Then let us lay down 
at once the unalterable rule: You will never 
start right in your youth without an adviser. 
Youth has strength, speed, stamina, willing¬ 
ness, courage, but it lacks one essential thing— 
experience. In the language of boxing, youth 
has the punch, but not the judgment of dis¬ 
tance. And poor judgment of distance means 


On Planting Regrets 171 

that the blows aimed mostly fall short, and at 
the same time pull the attacker squarely into 
the approaching fist of his opponent. The 
result is generally told in a word. 

Now, in one form or other, judgment of dis¬ 
tance is needed in everything we undertake 
in this world. And the way it is always learned 
is by taking counsel from the word and the 
training of those who know. The man who 
will take no advice is looked upon with dis¬ 
trust, on account of the damage he is sure 
finally to do to himself as well as to all who 
happen to be caught near him. And the boy 
starting life who thinks he can pilot his way 
alone and unadvised through the moral whirl¬ 
pools that await him is the boy over whom 
mothers weep and fathers despair. 

There are several types of boys who in 
their youth plant regrets for later years. We 
may briefly consider a few. First, there is 
the boy who is caught by passion in his early 
life; who has contracted bad habits; runs with 
a wild crowd; does what the crowd does; who, 
while at school, goes to confession when he 
has to, after school days goes rarely or not 
at all. 


172 On Planting Regrets 

This type of boy does not want any ad¬ 
vice, at least not any good advice. He has 
started out by thinking he knows it all, though 
really he has been taking advice right along 
from the “gang,” and has fed out of its dirty 
hand. He resents advice as an intrusion, as 
“preaching.” The only thing to do with him 
is what the employer does to the employe who 
gets huffed under direction, and that is to “let 
him out.” The police courts or the asylum 
will attend to him later. 

Then there is the shy boy, whose tendency 
is to keep at a distance from any one who 
might prove a friend in need. He is afraid 
to ask a question, afraid to state his case, 
afraid to meet his own difficulties, because he 
imagines that no one ever had difficulties like 
his. Shyness in itself is not a bad quality in 
youth, but its danger is to run into secretive¬ 
ness and a kind of sulky stubbornness that is 
sure to work harm to the one who lets it 
dominate him. 

The over shy boy never will be candid with 
his father and mother, never with his con¬ 
fessor. He will do enough to keep himself 
afloat, but he will never learn to swim power- 


On Planting Regrets 173 

fully, and he takes the dangerous risk of 
drowning. 

The third type we will mention is the boy 
who is not characteristically shy, but who, 
nevertheless, remains distant for the reason 
that he thinks his father or his mother or the 
priest will not care about listening to him. 
He is willing to be advised, but he thinks, for 
example, that the priest does not want to be 
bothered with boys or their difficulties. At the 
confessional he says to himself that there are 
too many waiting and he will not delay them. 
And as for calling on the priest at his house, 
the priest has other and bigger things to attend 
to than talking over a boy’s troubles. 

Now, it is never a person’s business that 
bothers him. It is the things not in his busi¬ 
ness that bother him. And this boy forgets 
that it is precisely the priest’s business to 
talk over difficulties, whether of old boys or 
young ones. “Do you not know,” Our Lord 
said, “that I must be about My Father’s busi¬ 
ness?” The business of His Father was the 
business of souls, and that is the business every 
priest is in—to save, help, direct, advise souls. 
So it is absolutely no bother to him. 



174 On Planting Regrets 

All these boys are making a serious mistake 
right at the beginning, where mistakes count. 
They are getting a false start. There is only 
one way to meet this difficulty, and that is by 
being aggressive, bold, importunate. Make up 
your mind that you mil get the solution of 
whatever difficulties beset you, that you simply 
must have it. And after that one decision you 
will find everything else easy. 

This is what the Church wishes us to do. 
How does the Church act with us? Does she 
spy on us, try to “catch” us? Do you notice 
her ferreting out anything about you, nagging, 
peeping, listening, trailing you about? Not at 
all. She lays her commands on all alike, offers 
her help to each one of her children, but after 
that she leaves it to you to do the aggressive 
work. If there is watching to do, then do it 
yourself. Listen to yourself, nag yourself, 
ferret yourself out. And after you have done 
that, then take advice of those who know how 
to help you. That is her policy. She knows 
very well that she cannot drive you; that God 
Himself cannot if you oppose Him. And so 
she says, “Follow me. I am the way.” Then 
she goes ahead, and shows the road, beckons, 


On Planting Regrets 175 

encourages, assists. She does not lurk behind 
you, sleuthing you. Her methods are not dark- 
lantern methods. She is the way, but we must 
bestir ourselves to find the way. ‘‘Come unto 
me all ye that are heavily burdened, and I 
will give you rest.” But we must do the com¬ 
ing, and carry the burden to her. We must 
have advice, indeed, but we must also ask for 
it. 

Is this sensible, reasonable, in perfect accord 
with human nature? It surely is. Any other 
method would not be treating us like men. 
Suppose a man driving his automobile dis¬ 
covers that the mechanism has gone wrong. 
He cannot repair it himself, and, if it is not re¬ 
paired, he knows that it will skid over an em¬ 
bankment some day or stop suddenly at a cross¬ 
ing where trains pass. What does he do? Keep 
on driving it? No; he takes it to a repair shop. 
He consults with experts. He explains, as 
well as he can, where the machine has been 
going wrong. He asks advice, and follows it 
like a sensible man. If he does not act so, he 
will surely come to grief. 

If you wish that tremendous engine, your 
soul, to go straight, and go dependably, watch 


176 On Planting Regrets 

it carefully. Observe when it wobbles, when 
it refuses to respond to the wheel of conscience. 
Then get it to the repair shop, ask advice, and 
do what is recommended. This is the first 
move, absolutely essential. And it is your 
move. 

And learn the habit of doing this while 
young. Shyness grows with age; hesitation, in¬ 
dulged, results in a dead stop. Then comes 
stagnation of soul, with a shell hardening and 
thickening about it all the time, until the soul 
is shut in, isolated, and life is finally one long 
sigh of hopeless regret. Don’t plant regrets 
in your youth. 


ON HAVING OUR OWN WAY 


O NE of the earliest surprises that comes 
to a boy in this world is the fact that 
he cannot have his own way. At first, of 
course, he doesn’t believe it is a fact. The 
one thing that he is sure of at the start is that 
he is going to have his own way. Little Jack, 
sitting on his mother’s lap, “boos” at the moon 
and stretches up his mites of hands to clutch 
the big gold toy. When he finds that he doesn’t 
quite reach he turns to his mother with a long, 
large-eyed, mournfully dignified look, as who 
would inquire, “What does the moon mean 
by this strange conduct?” 

We laugh at our friend Jack for his sim¬ 
plicity, and it would be really only a laughing 
matter if Jack were to get over his idea then 
and there. But he doesn’t. He still retains 
the conviction that in this little contest the 
moon was wrong and Jack was right. And 
the very next thing he wants he goes after 
on the same principle. His way is the right 

way. Every other way is wrong. 

177 


178 On Having Our Own Way 

“Naturally,” you will say, “he begins to 
‘get his bumps/ ” But—and here is where 
our laughter begins to fade—this particular 
type doesn’t learn a thing from the bumps he 
gets. He has experiences, but he never arrives 
at experience. How can he? He is always 
right, and, being so, he has already reached 
the goal of all experience—he never makes 
a mistake. 

Then how does baby Jack explain the 
bumps? These are all horrible blunders or 
cruel wrongs done him, the outcome of others’ 
ignorance or malice. So his child’s surprise 
turns gradually into resentment at the unfair 
way in which he is treated. Thence he declines 
into the perpetual-grievance stage; thence into 
the “sorehead”; thence into the “grouch”; 
thence into the cynic; until at last we have our 
Jack at thirty years of age, suspicious, snarl¬ 
ing, sour, and with exactly the same idea of 
himself he had at thirty days. Jack never gets 
into his second childhood, because he never 
gets out of his first. Large numbers of Baby 
Jacks encumber the ground. From “boo” to 
booby is one step for them, and they never take 
another. 


On Having Our Own Way 179 

On the supposition that one wishes to avoid 
belonging to the B. J. class of humans, what 
is one to do? The answer is contained in three 
short words: Stop—Look—Listen. Rightly 
studied and applied, these three little words 
will prove to be the combination to the safe 
that holds our happiness. 

First of all—Stop. Early in life—the earlier 
the better—when just about to step out into 
the world’s work, stop upon the verge. 

And why stop? 

In order to look —to look well, steadily, care¬ 
fully. 

At what? 

At that world out there before you—that 
wild, whirling, kaleidoscopic maze of men and 
women of every age and condition, with every 
variety of temperament, character, taste, cir¬ 
cumstance, ambitions, ideals, desires of soul 
and body; each individual of those crowding 
millions with a definite goal to gain and set 
plan of battle to gain it; lives and purposes 
crossing and recrossing at every conceivable 
angle and in the most unexpected encounters; 
advances and retreats; clashes and crashes; 
savage eddyings and zigzag dartings and 







180 On Having Our Own Way 

plungings forward, backward: a bewildering 
labyrinth of tumultuous, fiery, unquenchable 
souls, twisting, interwining, entangling them¬ 
selves into constantly shifting patterns that no 
human eye can trace and no human mind fore¬ 
cast. 

One good look out upon this seething ocean, 
and instantly you will say to yourself: “This 
is a riddle I shall never solve. In this world 
of men I shall never have my own way.” 

And you will be right. 

That is the one clear note steadily rising out 
of the apparently infinite disorder. Listen for 
that note, hear it, believe it, and you have 
obeyed the three magic words, Stop—Look— 
Listen, and you hold the combination to your 
own happiness. You have beheld a true vision; 
you have learned the lesson of life. 

But only theoretically—only, so to say, out 
of the book. There yet remains the doing, 
the following out of the vision, the practical, 
personal solution of the problem. Life, after 
all, is a big Dotheboys Hall, with Squeerses 
blossoming over it at sufficient intervals. We 
spell out a few words in our early years, and 
then, often as not driven by one or other of 


On Having Our Own Way 181 

the multiplying Mr. Squeerses, we go knock¬ 
ing up and down the world the rest of our 
existence, trying to “do” the spelling in a 
more or less presentable actuality. The impor¬ 
tant difference between Mr. Squeers’s estab¬ 
lishment and life is that in life so much depends 
on our spelling. If we wrongly spell the first 
few words we shall never “do” things, never get 
our work just right. 

However, let us take for granted that we 
have spelled our first words correctly, “Stop— 
Look—Listen,” and memorized our first line 
well, “I shall never have my own way.” Thus 
armed and accoutered, our next move is to step 
down from the peak of contemplation into the 
valley of actual life. 

Anything but a peaceful valley, this. A 
pulling and a hauling and a mauling; a hurly- 
burly, a Donnybrook fair on an immense scale. 
This is surprisingly different. A moment be¬ 
fore, on our peak of vantage, we understood 
everything; now, whirled in the melee, we 
understand nothing. Then we saw at least 
some faint outlines of a pattern; now we see 
nothing but stars. In spite of our clever spell¬ 
ing and our clear-cut memory lesson this makes 


182 On Having Our Own Way 

us peevish, irritates us, maddens us, until we 
begin to believe that, as a defense against this 
tremendous storm, the Stop—Look—Listen 
and I-shall-never-have-my-own-way recipe is 
about as effective as would be the effort to 
stop with a winning smile an insane elephant. 

Nevertheless the recipe still holds true. And 
if we would prove this to our own everlasting 
remembrance, let us set aside one day out of 
our lives on which we determine to turn fiercely 
upon the maddening crowd and for a single 
space of twenty-four hours to have our own 
way. 

What shall we begin with ? Shall it be dress ? 
Very well. Let us adopt a style of garment 
wherein one trouser’s leg ends at the knee; add 
a bright green coat, a crimson hat, and a pink 
necktie hanging down our back. 

After this we shall certainly need food. 
Step into a restaurant and call for whale’s 
blubber; or demand from our grocer fresh 
flamingo’s liver, and at once; or refuse to allow 
the corner peanut vender to proceed with his 
business until he has served us an oyster stew. 

By this time we shall have need to travel. 
Board a street car and, with sneers for the 
conductor, order the motorman to reverse his 


On Having Our Own Way 183 

direction, as it is our royal wish to go back¬ 
ward. After that take short cuts through the 
city, not by way of the streets, but over the 
roofs of houses. 

Or, pursued by alienists and others, perhaps 
we desire to see a ball game. Dash through 
the turnstile without paying; and, when we 
discover that it is the Athletics vs. the White 
Sox, stop the game, and explain that, being 
interested in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, team, we 
desire that team and no other to appear before 
us. (Air thickened with baseball bats, police 
clubs, pop bottles, cushions.) 

Or shall we choose to have our own way in 
society? March into a social gathering and 
tell all who are there exactly what we think 
about them. 

And when the day is done and the depart¬ 
ing rumble of the ambulance has died in the 
distance, when all the world is still, and we 
—well, somewhat stilled also, we shall, after a 
long interval of silence, lift our head from 
off the hospital pillow and whisper, “Please 
hand me my spelling book.” 

And just at this point we begin to emerge 
from the dismal swamp of experiences, out on 
the firm field of experience. We begin prac- 


184 On Having Our Own Way 

tically to fit into the world of men about us. 

Objections immediately start up: “Such a 
day as outlined above is a burlesque upon the 
facts. It never really happens.” 

I answer that it is not a burlesque upon 
the facts. It does really happen. The pic¬ 
ture is enlarged, but not exaggerated. Con¬ 
stantly, though on a less spectacular scale, the 
selfish struggle of men to have each his own 
way goes fiercely on, and just as constantly is 
trouble, often world-wide trouble, arising out 
of this struggle, like steam from a caldron. 
And each battle, microscopic though it be, con¬ 
tributes its mite to the cloud that blurs our 
vision of peace on earth. 

“But what of my individuality, my initia¬ 
tive, my personal influence? Am I to be a 
cipher, a dummy, an automaton?” 

I answer that the real ciphers in this world 
are the men who are bent always on hav¬ 
ing their own small way—the wire-pullers, 
fortune-hunters, fawners and flatterers. The 
lives of these men always sum up in zero. Na¬ 
poleon was born unheralded, on a little island. 
He tried as few men have tried, to have his 
own way. He gathered together many armies. 



On Having Our Own Way 185 

wielded much apparent power, and died alone 
on another little island, after years of a life 
there with less than the liberty of his baby¬ 
hood. He strove for isolated power; he 
achieved isolated weakness. And his story is 
infallibly repeated in the life of every man 
who imitates him, however distantly.. The 
man of genuine individuality and initiative is 
the very man who knows best that to have his 
own exclusive way is the one fatal blow to his 
cause. The man who never seeks his own per¬ 
sonal way is the man we trust forever. 

“But if the winds of opposition blow against 
the house of my conscience? If the current of 
the world dashes me toward the reef of sin? 
Shall I not have my own way then, and fight 
the evil?” 

Yes, then we must fight the evil; but even 
then we shall not be having our own way, 
but God’s way. And this point opens to us 
the full purpose of life—the perfect har¬ 
monizing of the material world without us 
with the spiritual world within. “He that 
loveth his life (with the emphasis on £ his’) 
shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this 
world keepeth it unto life eternal.” 



MOTHER OF GOOD COUNSEL 

Mother of Good Counsel—Pray for us. 

T HIS invocation of the Litany of the 
Blessed Virgin is peculiarly suited to the 
needs of the present day. It is made up of 
practically two words, but these contain two 
great ideas. And first the idea of counsel. 

Counsel may be defined as deliberate advice. 
And if we look about us at the world we move 
in, we find it to be a world of advice met with 
at every turn and under every artful guise. 
The newsboy shouts along the street, advising 
us to read all about the latest murder, the latest 
bank robbery, the startling family scandal. In 
the street cars, from the shop windows, the bill 
posters, the display signs, we are persistently 
advised to take thought as to what we shall 
eat and what we shall wear and how we should 
entertain ourselves. 

The lives of those about us, also, the things 

we see them do, what we hear of them, are 

other forms of advice. We see people of 

186 


Mother of Good Counsel 187 

wealth seeking happiness at the cost of con¬ 
science, and their example is tacit advice to 
us to do likewise, even if on a smaller scale. 
Our companions, our acquaintances, every 
word we hear, every movement we observe, is 
only so much advice hypodermically injected, 
we may say. And finally, our lower nature 
advises us, and frequently echoes violently all 
the advice with which we are literally pelted 
from every quarter of the world. 

How much of this advice directly or in¬ 
directly tells us to let go duty, conscience, 
purity, the friendship of God, and to pick 
up with the first pleasure we meet! And it 
keeps coming in, bewildering, puzzling, allur¬ 
ing, discouraging us, weakening us down— 
all this had counsel, this deliberately bad ad¬ 
vice. 

Surely we need some defense, some balance, 
some advice on the other side. Sometimes, of 
course, when we think we are particularly 
strong, we imagine we don’t need defense, 
advice. We have youth and speed and power, 
and we dash forth with a buoyant recklessness, 
only to end like the great ship Titantic, which 
tore full speed through the ice fields, only to 


188 Mother of Good Counsel 

have the knife-edge of an iceberg rip open her 
side and plunge her, and all the souls that had 
trusted her, into the deep. The young soul 
often perishes thus, and it never goes down 
alone. 

But in our clear moments we do see that we 
need help. Then where shall we go to get it? 
Advisers are rare. It is not a simple matter 
to find one who can really guide our soul. Be¬ 
cause the guide whom we will trust absolutely, 
even in a single one of our spiritual difficulties, 
must be one who understands and sympathizes 
with human nature through and through, not 
in a general, theoretic, textbook fashion, but 
in concrete, flesh-and-blood detail. 

Just as in a hazardous journey through a 
wild mountain chain we should never choose a 
guide who had studied the ground from maps 
merely and from photographs, nor one who 
knew but a single trail and outside of that was 
baffled, but we should trust only one who had 
been over every foot of the mountains in per¬ 
son and who had at his finger tips every bypath 
and cross-trail of the whole range, so it must 
be with the soul-guide we shall lean upon 
utterly to guide us surely over the particular 


Mother of Good Counsel 189 

road God wishes us to follow. It is necessary 
to have one near us who knows the multitu¬ 
dinous and twisting roads over which the 
millions of men travel, each on his own chosen 
way, and who can, from the tangle of inter¬ 
crossing roads, unfailingly pick out our very 
road and none other. 

More than this: Our guide must not only 
be one who knows the individual road, but must 
in addition show us how to travel it, step after 
step; must see far ahead of us, see the last 
point to which we should climb; must estimate 
how fast we can climb, and how high; where 
we should rest, where hurry; where risk, and 
where be cautious. So that there shall be 
a definite final aim for me as an individual, 
and so that on my way to accomplish that aim 
I shall constantly put forth my best work. In 
short, the guide whom I shall choose and trust 
forever shall be one who understands and sym¬ 
pathizes with not merely human nature, but 
my human nature. 

Who shall advise me at this vital turning- 
point ? 

Our difficulty is no sooner encountered than 
it is solved. The Mother of Good Counsel is 


190 Mother of Good Counsel 

with us. Among all beings purely human she 
is the best of all counselors. 

And why ? 

Because, best of all mortals, she understands 
human nature. She had with her as her child 
and her constant companion the most wonder¬ 
ful of all human beings. Him she studied per¬ 
fectly; saw with her own eyes, followed with 
her own heart, beat by beat, the human nature 
in her Son, perfectly operating. 

Not, then, as one studies out of a book did 
she study Jesus. For years and years the very 
pulsing of His life was around her; His words, 
acts, even His thoughts were present to her. 
He talked with her, told her everything, His 
difficulties. His troubles. His wishes. His ideas 
about us and her part in helping us. And just 
as she had given Him bodily life He in turn 
fixed indelibly upon her soul the image of 
Himself in the smallest detail of action, the 
image of the perfect child of God. 

Mary, therefore, best of all, knows the end 
each of us should reach—the imitation of that 
Son, whose perfect life on earth she remembers 
with such accuracy to-day through every little 
turn. And when we go to her she can tell us 


Mother of Good Counsel 191 

just exactly how He acted and just exactly 
how we can bring ourselves, each in his own 
way, to imitate Him. She is the only one who 
saw everything, and she is the only one who can 
tell us all about Him in absolute detail. 

And finally, she is not only the best of all 
counselors because best in the knowledge of hu¬ 
man nature, but she will counsel us as a mother; 
she will best understand my human nature. 
This is what we want—affectionate advice. 
We do not wish to be nagged, spied upon, pur¬ 
sued. Neither do we wish to be neglected, 
overlooked, forgotten. We desire to be treated 
kindly, clearly, understanding^: no lofty con¬ 
descension about the advice we get, no hard 
superiority, no icy remoteness, no peevishness 
or discontent with us, no hint of despising us. 
For, though we may perhaps be strong enough 
to despise ourselves, we would never be strong 
enough to have her despise us. And this she 
will never do. The blessed charm of the 
Mother of Good Counsel lies not in her dis¬ 
tance from us, but in her loving nearness to 
us. 

Our part, then, is to see to it that we do not 
keep aloof from her; that we do our share in 




192 Mother of Good Counsel 

going right up close to her, in talking to her 
familiarly, as a son to his mother. And Mary 
will understand us, love us as our poor human 
hearts crave to be loved, crave it the most when 
we are at the lowest ebb in our spiritual for¬ 
tunes. 

She will love us even more after she has 
heard us out; tell us gently what to do; with 
her own mother’s hands will help us out of 
any trouble whatsoever, with the tender con¬ 
stancy, the unwearying persistency of a 
mother. She will aid us to get to the surface 
the best that is lurking in every one of us. 
She will hear our troubles patiently, confer 
with us unhurriedly, affectionately show to us 
the very particular trait in her Son’s life that 
meets our present difficulty. She will start us 
quietly upon the work of imitating that trait, 
will remain near us unobtrusively to guide us 
with gentle mother-touches of suggestion, and 
she will prove in all ways unto us our dear 
Mother of Good Counsel. 

THE END 


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